Qpitome's Submission

Inspiration

The challenge premise (that a 1-qubit gate can be harder than a 2-qubit gate) seemed wrong to us at first. That was enough to get us interested.

What it does

It's a technical writeup and codebase that explains why the ghost was right. We work through gate synthesis, error correction, and QuEra's hardware to show where the real cost comes from.

How we built it

Mostly Bloqade for simulation, organized across the STAR and SYNTH modules. We spent a lot of the first day just reading to get up to speed on Clifford+T and STAR before writing much code.

Challenges we ran into

The T gate rabbit hole is genuinely deep, and we underestimated it. Learning Bloqade's API mid-competition also slowed us down more than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We actually understand the answer now. The visualizations also came out well; they make the cost asymmetry click in a way that's hard to do with just math.

What we learned

Once you understand why T gates are expensive, the whole claim stops being counterintuitive. We came out with a much clearer picture of the logical-to-physical qubit gap and why it's such a central problem in the field.

What's next for Qpitome's Submission

More synthesis benchmarking - we only covered part of the trade-off space. It'd also be pretty interesting to revisit this with a proper quantum computer rather than just simulation.