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Quantum Computing
What Quantum Computers Are For: A Mathematician’s Map of Quantum Advantage
The mathematician's answer to what quantum computers are for: three problem families where the advantage is real, the theorems that cap combinatorics at quadratic, and the open problems stated in your notation.
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Quantum Computing
Quantum Computing for Mathematicians: From Four Axioms to Shor’s Algorithm
Everything a mathematician needs to understand quantum computing: the four axioms, why "trying all answers at once" is wrong, how interference powers Shor and Grover, and where mathematicians are needed next.
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Quantum Computing
Several Vendors Now Supply Quantum Error Correction’s Classical Loop. The Qubits Are Still the Hard Part.
Riverlane, Qblox, Altera, Xanadu, AMD, NVIDIA and IonQ spent September turning error correction's classical loop into parts with published interfaces and measured latencies. What they tested, on what data, and how I now read fault-tolerance timelines.
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Industry
Infleqtion Hits 30 Logical Qubits With Error Detection. Its Original 2026 Target Called for Error Correction.
Infleqtion met its 2026 goal of 30 logical qubits on Sqale with eight-atom blocks that detect errors and discard failed runs. The goal it replaced in 2025 called for error correction.
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Leadership
Paying for AI’s Data Centers Would Take 250 Million Jobs. America Has 159 Million
In 2020 I co-wrote that AI itself would become a commodity. Six years and $1.5 trillion of data centers later, I convert the build-out's revenue needs into jobs and ask how much of AI's value its makers must keep.
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Research
Microsoft and Qolab Propose Four Conditions for a Scalable Logical Qubit. DOE’s $215 Million Competition Leaves Its Test to Negotiation.
Troyer, Nayak and Martinis want the word scalable reserved for logical qubits kept alive by repeated error correction and real-time decoding. I checked ten studies and announcements since April 2024 against their conditions and DOE's new competition rules.
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Quantum Commercialization
Nobody Checked the Physics: How Venture Due Diligence Went Missing Where the Checks Are Largest
On Carta's platform the median startup waits 774 days for a Series A. The hottest deep-tech deals close in days on no product. Between those numbers is where nobody can see the physics checked, and quantum is paying for it.
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Systems & Engineering
IonQ Shows a Single Laptop CPU Can Decode a Simulated 408-Logical-Qubit Trapped-Ion Computer in Real Time
IonQ researchers decoded simulated trapped-ion workloads on 12 Apple M4 Max cores, the largest with 408 logical qubits and another with over a million T gates, adding under 0.3% delay at a two-qubit error rate of one in 10,000.
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Quantum Security & PQC
China’s Next-Generation Crypto Candidates Drew 104 Public Findings in Three Days. Researchers Broke Five Designs on Day Two
Within three days of China publishing its first-round candidates, public reports listed 104 findings against 65 of them. Saarinen's AI-assisted sweep found code bugs; researchers posting to ICCS's own forums found the design breaks.
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Quantum Snake Oil
Deterministic Quantum Computing
Some quantum vendors now promise answers that are exact, identical on every rerun, and free of sampling. Quantum error correction uses 'deterministic' in a narrower sense, and no published method delivers what the pitch implies.
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Quantum Security & PQC
FIPS 140-2 Goes Historical Today – What Actually Changes and What Doesn’t
Every remaining FIPS 140-2 certificate moves to the CMVP Historical list on September 21, 2026. The sunset changes procurement, not operations – but the supply-side gap in FIPS 140-3 validated modules makes the transition harder than the seven-year runway implied.
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Quantum Security & PQC
Apple Joins the Merkle Tree Certificate Consensus – and Raises the Bar
Apple's Root Program has committed to Merkle Tree Certificates for TLS with requirements that go beyond Chrome's in key respects, while taking the composite-algorithm path for S/MIME – confirming the two-track PKI fork organizations must plan for.
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Post-Quantum, PQC, Quantum Security
One Quantum Threat, Many Migrations: How and Why PQC Programmes Are Diverging Around the World
Fresh from GISEC in Dubai and ahead of a keynote in Maryland: the same quantum threat is being managed very differently across the US, Europe, the Gulf and Asia, and each migration has produced something the others could use.
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Quantum Computing
Data Centers in Space Don’t Work. Quantum AI Data Centers in Space Are an Absurdity.
An investor asked me to evaluate a pitch for quantum AI data centers in orbit. The physics, the engineering, and the economics all say the same thing: no.
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Quantum Security & PQC
RSA-896 Factored With Claude on Spare GPUs, 16 Days After RSA-260
Stephen Weis of Anthropic used Claude to port CADO-NFS to GPUs and factored RSA-896 on idle capacity, 16 days after Cognition's RSA-260 record. RSA-2048 remains about 35 billion times harder and needs a quantum computer.
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