Preprocessing direct in QEC microcode

Bullshit is sort of the opposite of a problem in coNP. Instead of hard to find but efficient to verify it is false, it is easy to find and hard to verify it is false.

Thoth is short for The Toric Code in Ancient Egyptian.

Ancient Egyptian resource theory with Clifford operations

A few quick notes: 1) Magic - not my favorite word choice - comes from magic angle directions and into quantum computing by arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph... . It is not about entanglement.

If I believed in the simulation hypothesis (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulat... for my opinion that somehow made it to Wikipedia) I’d say this is obviously how magic works arxiv.org/abs/2511.15304

The riverlane report is excellent, thanks to the authors for correcting a minor minor minor bug :).

Chris Umans, Siki Wang A number-theoretic conjecture implying faster algorithms for polynomial factorization and integer factorization https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10851

Ancient Egyptian Causality

Apply now for SFI’s 2026 CSSS Journalism Fellowship (June 9–July 8). Each year, two accomplished journalists join our summer school program for a deep dive into complexity science. Stipend, housing, and travel covered. Applications open until Feb. 4, 2026. Apply: www.santafe.edu/news-center/...

We taught a quantum computer to learn from its own mistakes-- without stopping. Our RL framework repurposes QEC detection events as learning signals to stabilize the system. Result: Improved Logical Error Rates for both Surface and Color codes on Willow! see arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2511.08493

The list of accepted papers for #QIP2026 is now online at qip2026.lu.lv/programme/ac...

“but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition” - Borges

Hopefullly they also include test of space awards.

Down with the Pauli group stabilizer hegemony scirate.com/arxiv/2511.0...

Department of Physics at UIUC is looking for an Assistant Professor in Theoretical Quantum Information Science, including, but not limited to, quantum error correction, quantum optics, quantum algorithms, and AMO physics. Application deadline: Dec 1 illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

To celebrate 2025 John Bell Day, which marks the work of the great Northern Irish quantum physicist, do check out this legendary feature he wrote for Physics World just before he died in 1990. ⚛️🧪🔭 physicsworld.com/a/against-me...

Congratulations to Venkat Guruswami, new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (@simonsinstitute.bsky.social)! And congrats to us, the Theoretical CS community, for having someone as good, dedicated, and wonderful as him at the helm of a place so important to us! #TCSSky

The Frontiers of Programmable Quantum Dynamics: Advances and Applications conference has concluded today, and recorded talks are now available to watch at buff.ly/2lD7WTC and buff.ly/AXJjS4e Watch more talks from the associated program online at buff.ly/QHE8YtH 🧪

It’s really too bad that my sub-field of quantum foundations research doesn’t have any Halloween-related or spooky aspects, no way that anyone could ever use the season to drum up any... any fake-quoted, overdramatic… Oh. Oh dear. molotovsunsets.substack.com/p/the-univer...

Another day, another arxiv paper claiming that classical gravity can produce entanglement. Last week's Nature paper continues to cause confusion. But classical fields can't create entanglement *even if* they directly couple two masses. Comment added at superposer.substack.com/p/no-classic...

Academia giving up self governance makes me so sad. I remember when Caltech used to have faculty actually interview undergrad applicants, which I think led to more outliers and quirkiness. Efficiency breeds homogeneity.

43 years ago today, readers the world over opened their newspapers and gazed upon cow tools for the first time. happy birthday cow tools. you look great.

yeah, i read theory

This story reminded me of the magazine Quantum, a godsend for me, rural high school hick who loved math and physics. It turns out the issues are all online www.nsta.org/quantum-maga...

📣 𝗨𝗽𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗸 On 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟴, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 (𝟭𝟲:𝟬𝟬 𝗔𝗺𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗱𝗮𝗺 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲), 𝗔𝗹𝗲𝘅 𝗠𝗲𝗶𝗯𝘂𝗿𝗴 will give a talk on his paper “𝗔 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗤𝘂𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗺 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗶𝗻’𝘀 𝗟𝗲𝗺𝗺𝗮 𝗶𝗻 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗻” (buff.ly/TnHFhZE) at the Lean Seminar in Amsterdam. 🔗 Zoom link: buff.ly/w7DqsRC 🆔 Meeting ID: 610 4772 0375

Perona and Belongie wondered if they could replace search words with images, but they knew that it would not be easy to convince people to tediously and appropriately tag every object and its parts in millions of pictures. www.caltech.edu/about/news/p...

No they do not. I'll try to write something up in the next few days....

Are you a computer scientist and don't know what an OTOC is, but want to understand the problem solved in the recent Nature paper by Google Quantum AI? We wrote a 2-page note that explains the motivation and presents a simplified version of the problem for any input size. scirate.com/arxiv/2510.1...

In this SFI Seminar, biographer Alec Nevala-Lee explores the life of physicist and Nobel laureate Luis W. Alvarez, whose work spanned the Manhattan Project, investigating the JFK assassination, and developing the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction. youtu.be/F4KGgtxNF58

Fault-tolerant logical measurement just got a lot faster! In new work, we show that code surgeries based on hypergraphs, rather than graphs, allow fast and parallel fault-tolerant logical measurements with low qubit overhead (without requiring the code to be single-shot). arxiv.org/abs/2510.14895

I’ll take “What is the fixed point of LLMs” for $200 Alex.

Coming out of social media hibernation to ask: Are you interested in hosting a future QEC conf? We are looking for detailed bids for QEC27 over the next month (provisional deadline 21st November). For more info: DM or email me. QEC26 will be in Santa Barbara

Dear funding agencies, I know we all want to discover the wonder drug that will cure the horrible diseases, but to do that, we need to invest in basic, unsexy, foundational research on how the systems work. Funding can’t all be drug development. Sincerely, Looking for basic research grants.

Destroying a national treasure.

What if the measurement problem isn't about explaining how the classical world emerges from the quantum world... ...but about what happens when quantum systems interact with something that's already classical? Turns out, the collapse postulate + Born rule emerge! scirate.com/arxiv/2510.0... 🧪⚛️🧵1/5

This is what courage in the face of authoritarianism looks like. No university should take Trump's bribe & surrender their integrity — bending the knee to a bully only feeds the beast & puts ALL our rights at risk. Others should follows MIT’s example ASAP.

scirate.com/arxiv/2510.08418 and scirate.com/arxiv/2510.0... with Renato Renner, Takahiro Sagawa, and Philippe Faist. We find a risk–reward trade-off governed by Rényi divergences. The resource theory framework unifies gambling, utility theory, and hypothesis testing. 2/

Renyi divergences emerge when agents bet (or "invest" as some people call it), over a finite number of rounds. In the limit of an infinite number of bets we recover the Kelly Criterion, given in terms of Relative entropy distances (KL divergences). Such a fun project! 4/4

for the EPA legally to use the report under Information Quality Act guidelines) and (2) hey, there’s an 85+ author, 450-page review of the cherry-picking, misrepresenting, selectively citing DOE report there to discuss (and which Koonin conveniently ignores, talk about pot calling the kettle black)

🧪⚛️ The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics - a brief writeup about what is meant here by macroscopic quantum tunneling. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/10/2025...

Nice result on inherent size of fault-tolerance scirate.com/arxiv/2510.0... "Our work contributes to this broader effort by providing evidence of inherent limits: Even when codes have good rate, there may be fundamental constraints on how much they can reduce the volume of fault-tolerant circuits."

Portland is, I can attest from many personal visits, not a disaster or whatever hate that is tossed at it by people who don’t know how to love. We’re with you southern neighbor.

Charlie Bennett should win the Nobel prize in Physics this year.

Like...this is the biggest corruption scandal the NIH has experienced in its entire history and its not even close. Half of a BILLION dollars to a single project as a result of political spoils. That's the equivalent of several hundred R01s.

CU computer science is doing a search for a tenure-track position in quantum computing this year: jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta.... The scope of the search in particular includes quantum CS theory! AMA about how awesome Boulder and Colorado are!

blog.google/technology/r... E

Wat? Sort of answers what was original motivation for iswap, at least for me, is iswap better for some code? Did not expect the color code to be the answer!

Portlanders — show off your corner of war-ravaged Portland below.

Gauging versus dualities: equivalent up to constant depth quantum circuits. arxiv.org/abs/2509.22051