Abstract
Two primary challenges stand in the way of practical large-scale quantum computation, namely achieving sufficiently low error rate quantum gates and implementing interesting quantum algorithms with a physically reasonable number of qubits. In this work we address the second challenge, presenting a new technique, bridge compression, which enables remarkably low volume structures to be found that implement complex computations in the surface code. The surface code has a number of highly desirable properties, including the ability to achieve arbitrarily reliable computation given sufficient qubits and quantum gate error rates below approximately 1%, and the use of only a 2-D array of qubits with nearest neighbor interactions. As such, our compression technique is of great practical relevance.