6-7X Quantum Advantage

Inspiration

My life collided with the "Quantum Economic Calculator" a few times this semester. The paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21031) and project (https://futuretech.mit.edu/quantum-economic-advantage-calculator) came out in August. It came on my radar when I saw it presented at the Quantum World Congress in September. Something didn't sit right then, where was the error rate? Inputting company roadmaps seemed fraught with bias. I asked the presenter at QWC and it sparked a longer conversation with a group of us after the conference. I let this information sit until last week when the paper was referenced in a class (CS 839) debate by my opponents. They cited the brand name of the authors and the forecast dates for quantum advantage and I registered my concerns with such conclusions.

Thus, the challenge was set. How do we improve upon this model? Can we unbake this cake? We need to properly identify the key parameters which affect results. Distilling these parameters will help us be more objective. Instead of starting with company roadmaps, could we use peer-reviewed historical data to give hard data points instead of moving target company roadmap projections? The total number of qubits is a meaningless number without specifying quality performance metrics which incorporate error rates.

What it does

Turns lemons into lemonade... We try to salvage the concept by changing the model parameters to give some context to the question of quantum economic advantage.

How we built it

Ideation. Reading research papers. Argh. Perhaps this isn't the cool tech of a usual hackathon project, but it's a start.

Challenges we ran into

Although my intuition helped identify some issues, doing the work to properly characterize a model to forecast quantum economic advantage is quite challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It's a start.

What we learned

Tons. One resource utilized during the hackathon was reviewing the results from IBM through their "State of the Union" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IbGCMWlwEo) earlier this month at QDC. There are copious challenges being tackled simultaneously to bring "Quantum Advantage", in its many manifestations, and the associated sliding scale definition thereof.