Congratulations to our MSPQC student, Henry Lin, for his team winning the BlueQubit’s challenge at the YQuantum hackathon event!

Photo of Henry Lin

YQuantum is a hackathon organized by Yale every year. BlueQubit hosted their global challenge both remotely and in person at Yale. The challenge was about finding the hidden bitstring in a peaked circuit, an idea introduced by Scott Aaronson to show quantum advantage. In a peaked circuit, there is only one hidden computational basis state, or bitstring, that has a significantly higher amplitude than all other bitstrings. Given 6 peaked circuits, their task was to figure out the 6 hidden bitstrings.  Circuits 4 to 6 were constructed in a way that was difficult to solve by a classical or a current quantum computer due to the large Hilbert space, depth of the circuit, and the number of operations. All teams present at YQuantum were able to figure out 3 out of the 6 hidden strings. Henry’s team gave the best presentation and the best possible solutions to solve circuits 4 to 6.