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

Photo of Henry Lin

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.