This paper reports on experiments realized on several IBM 5Q chips which show
evidence for the advantage of using error detection and fault-tolerant design
of quantum circuits. We show an average improvement of the task of sampling
from states that can be fault-tolerantly prepared in the [[4,2,2]] code, when
using a fault-tolerant technique well suited to the layout of the chip. By
showing that fault-tolerant quantum computation is already within our reach,
the author hopes to encourage this approach.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, 6 table