I'm teaching an introductory 12 week course on Quantum Oracle Engineering A Programmer’s Guide to Building the Right Oracle IEEE Quantum Week 2026 (QCE26), Toronto, Canada. Most quantum speedup claim
By Coderz Club · 2026-09-06 · Tags: coding
I'm teaching an introductory 12 week course on Quantum Oracle Engineering
A Programmer’s Guide to Building the Right Oracle IEEE Quantum Week 2026 (QCE26), Toronto, Canada. Most quantum speedup claims depend on an oracle that exists only on paper. This course teaches the craft of building practical quantum circuits from scratch. Notify me Choose the problem, build the oracle 1. A different computer CPU, GPU, QPU: three devices, three workloads the QPU’s job: fewer samples for an average queries in place of samples three questions: task randomness, precision, oracle cost Grover on a database loses to data loading break-even: View slides 2. The Monte Carlo speedup a query count is not a runtime the payoff qubit’s angle encodes the win probability amplitude estimation reads that angle to precision ε best of k arms: samples vs queries Go fails question 1, the bandit fails question 3 Sway: gaps of 10⁻⁴ on a 32×32 board the same oracle shape fits an epidemic model Coming Sept 8 3. Ship it the contract: board, two moves, randomness tape, payoff qubit one round: Black places, White places, every stone rolls the register layout in Qiskit a uniform move choice over the legal cells the d20 as a 5-bit comparison against a neighbor count 3×3, two rounds: 169 qubits Coming Sept 15 4. Reversible by design amplitude estimation runs the rollout forward and backward decide from the old board, write to a shadow board, keep the old one in-place updates read a neighbor that already flipped erase move-selection scratch before the board changes one payoff qubit, everything else inverted the qubit and gate count as the board grows Coming Sept 22 Make it correct 5. Garbage collection reversible circuits have no delete entangled scratch breaks interference Bennett: compute, copy out, uncompute the inverse must see the same inputs as the forward pass peak scratch sets the qubit count clean scratch is necessary, not sufficient Coming Sept 29 6. Measure to erase the textbook says never measure mid-circuit compilers measure scratch to reclaim qubits Gidney’s AND†: an X-basis measurement instead of a Toffoli a random sign, fixed by one phase gate half the T gates of an adder safe when scratch holds a basis function of the data Coming Oct 6 7. Calling conventions three scratch classes: clean, borrowed, conditionally clean Qiskit passes the reuse condition as unchecked convention a block can destroy its own condition two correct blocks, one unguaranteed boundary restoration types: Hoare contracts over subspaces a 12-bit oracle: 20 qubits to 13 Coming Oct 13 8. Proof-carrying circuits truth tables cannot see a phase full-basis checking costs 2ⁿ certificates replayed by a Lean kernel gate-by-gate checking needs closure under the gate set past Toffoli, assertions grow exponentially one theorem per family, checked in milliseconds Coming Oct 20 Count it, test it, judge it 9. Where the quantum lives a process that runs step by step between any two steps, classical bits would do no one classical carrier works for all steps at once (Bisio) the SHIFTS channel: one qubit in, two out, built to show it the quantum lives in the memory between steps Coming Oct 27 10. All or nothing running n copies does not amortize quantum memory: zero or linear in n, nothing between and scalings ruled out the same law for preparing states SHIFTS: at least 0.03 qubits per copy a theorem, with constants Coming Nov 3 11. Test, don’t trust a test with single-qubit measurements only a correct device passes every time q qubits of memory pass with probability at most too little memory fails exponentially fast the device stays a black box Coming Nov 10 12. Audit the next claim the AI era’s assumption: compute closes every gap the wall: tiny gaps, irreducible randomness weak baselines, query counts sold as runtimes ignored parallelism, solver randomness as task randomness oracle cost hidden behind “assume oracle access” the three questions on a headline claim, live Coming Nov 17 Live Tutorial Agenda Session 1 (90 minutes): Lessons 1 and 2, identifying a problem worth accelerating. Session 2 (90 minutes): Lessons 3 and 4, building the rollout oracle. For practitioners and researchers comfortable with qubits, controlled gates, and circuit diagrams. Taught by Nishant Shukla · Art by Lazybuns
A Programmer’s Guide to Building the Right Oracle IEEE Quantum Week 2026 (QCE26), Toronto, Canada. Most quantum speedup claims depend on an oracle that exists only on paper. This course teaches the craft of building practical quantum circuits from scratch. Notify me Choose the problem, build the oracle 1. A different computer CPU, GPU, QPU: three devices, three workloads the QPU’s job: fewer samples for an average queries in place of samples three questions: task randomness, precision, oracle cost Grover on a database loses to data loading break-even: View slides 2. The Monte Carlo speedup a query count is not a runtime the payoff qubit’s angle encodes the win probability amplitude estimation reads that angle to precision ε best of k arms: samples vs queries Go fails question 1, the bandit fails question 3 Sway: gaps of 10⁻⁴ on a 32×32 board the same oracle shape fits an epidemic model Coming Sept 8 3. Ship it the contract: board, two moves, randomness tape, payoff qubit one round: Black places, White places, every stone rolls the register layout in Qiskit a uniform move choice over the legal cells the d20 as a 5-bit comparison against a neighbor count 3×3, two rounds: 169 qubits Coming Sept 15 4. Reversible by design amplitude estimation runs the rollout forward and backward decide from the old board, write to a shadow board, keep the old one in-place updates read a neighbor that already flipped erase move-selection scratch before the board changes one payoff qubit, everything else inverted the qubit and gate count as the board grows Coming Sept 22 Make it correct 5. Garbage collection reversible circuits have no delete entangled scratch breaks interference Bennett: compute, copy out, uncompute the inverse must see the same inputs as the forward pass peak scratch sets the qubit count clean scratch is necessary, not sufficient Coming Sept 29 6. Measure to erase the textbook says never measure mid-circuit compilers measure scratch to reclaim qubits Gidney’s AND†: an X-basis measurement instead of a Toffoli a random sign, fixed by one phase gate half the T gates of an adder safe when scratch holds a basis function of the data Coming Oct 6 7. Calling conventions three scratch classes: clean, borrowed, conditionally clean Qiskit passes the reuse condition as unchecked convention a block can destroy its own condition two correct blocks, one unguaranteed boundary restoration types: Hoare contracts over subspaces a 12-bit oracle: 20 qubits to 13 Coming Oct 13 8. Proof-carrying circuits truth tables cannot see a phase full-basis checking costs 2ⁿ certificates replayed by a Lean kernel gate-by-gate checking needs closure under the gate set past Toffoli, assertions grow exponentially one theorem per family, checked in milliseconds Coming Oct 20 Count it, test it, judge it 9. Where the quantum lives a process that runs step by step between any two steps, classical bits would do no one classical carrier works for all steps at once (Bisio) the SHIFTS channel: one qubit in, two out, built to show it the quantum lives in the memory between steps Coming Oct 27 10. All or nothing running n copies does not amortize quantum memory: zero or linear in n, nothing between and scalings ruled out the same law for preparing states SHIFTS: at least 0.03 qubits per copy a theorem, with constants Coming Nov 3 11. Test, don’t trust a test with single-qubit measurements only a correct device passes every time q qubits of memory pass with probability at most too little memory fails exponentially fast the device stays a black box Coming Nov 10 12. Audit the next claim the AI era’s assumption: compute closes every gap the wall: tiny gaps, irreducible randomness weak baselines, query counts sold as runtimes ignored parallelism, solver randomness as task randomness oracle cost hidden behind “assume oracle access” the three questions on a headline claim, live Coming Nov 17 Live Tutorial Agenda Session 1 (90 minutes): Lessons 1 and 2, identifying a problem worth accelerating. Session 2 (90 minutes): Lessons 3 and 4, building the rollout oracle. For practitioners and researchers comfortable with qubits, controlled gates, and circuit diagrams. Taught by Nishant Shukla · Art by Lazybuns