Claude Beat the Best Quantum Circuits Ever Published: Here's the Loop, and the Prompt to Run It on Your Own Code
Researchers gave Claude a plain brief and a checker that scores every try, then let it keep going with no human help. It beat the best published designs on eight tasks. Here's how the loop works and a prompt that sets it up for you
Anthropic's researchers handed Claude eight quantum-circuit design jobs, each written in plain language, plus a program that checks every design is correct and scores it. Claude proposed a design, got its score, revised it, and repeated, with no human input between rounds.
Here's what it found, why the checker is the whole trick, and how to run the same loop on your own code.
What Claude found
- Across all eight tasks, Claude designed smaller and faster circuits than the best ones published, in some cases by ten times or more.
- Elliptic-curve point addition: in one 53-hour run, a design with 17x fewer gates than the smallest published one, using 12% more qubits.
- A Reed-Solomon decoder for a quantum optimization method: about 12x fewer gates than Google's previous design.
- For scale: shrinking one famous chemistry estimate from 50 trillion gates to 340 million took many human research groups eight years.
Why the checker is the trick
- The checker tells Claude two things on every try: is it still correct, and is it better than before.
- So Claude can't fool itself. A faster design that breaks something scores zero.
- The researchers also asked Claude to try several very different approaches at once, because on its own it tended to stick to well-known ideas and second-guess its own wins.
Free, for your email
Get the full setup steps + the copy-paste setup prompt
The rest of this guide (3 more sections, 1 copy-paste prompt) opens right here. The setup prompt, one paste into Claude that sets it all up, comes by email only. Use your real address.
50,000+ follow where these guides come from. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.