Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”

gadders

Love the word "boffin". I think we should use "pundit" more often as well.

frollogaston

Was pleasantly surprised to see the exact bug in here, in a "The Register" article of all places. Legg showed that fixing the bug invalidates the research. Seems Microsoft is responding to a clear problem with a vague dismissal. Edit: Oh, The Register is a true tech paper, guess the name makes sense for that. Got mixed up cause there are a bunch of general papers called something Register.

rdtsc

> boffins willing to go on the record as describing Microsoft's work as "unreliable" and perhaps even "fraudulent." > Microsoft insisted its work is sound and in early June 2026 announced Majorana 2, a "next-generation topological quantum chip" it developed with the help of its own agentic AI. AI hallucinates quantum computing bullshit as well or better than humans can hallucinate quantum computing bullshit. Couldn't have a better combination of technologies helping each other out.

mjhay

You’d really think they’d really check everything and cross their t’s after their previous issues in marjorana fermion QC. I generally have a very high opinion of MS research, but this is getting a bit embarrassing.

josefritzishere

Is it premature to assume it's due to AI Microslop?

jdw64

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-quantum-tgp ``` return xr.apply_ufunc( lambda x: (x - x[::-1]) / 2, conductance, input_core_dims=[dims], output_core_dims=[dims], vectorize=True, ) ``` Reading the article about how they filtered and cherry-picked specific regions, I got curious about the actual asymmetry computation, so I looked up the source code. Looking at it, they seem to have used memory offsets as if they were physical coordinates, but they're only looking at the array index order, not the actual values. x[::-1] isn't measuring physical coordinates; it's just reversing the array. So it seems this bias axis mentioned in the article only forms when things are symmetric. But in typical numerical computations, isn't it pretty common to reverse arrays like this? In this case, there must be a reason why the physical coordinates change. Should we be verifying invariants here? Sometimes I see people who find these kinds of issues and I think they're really amazing. Even after reading the article, tracing it, and debugging it, I kept wondering what the problem was..

Isamu

When I see “boffin” in a title I think “The Register” so kudos I guess.

ck2

Majorana fermion and Ettore Majorana are fascinating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_fermion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana

dmvjs

i assumed Boffin was their last name

frankohn

I guess Microsoft upper management doesn't understand anything at all about quantum computing and they are "scammed" by Microsoft research people in quantum computing telling them they are making breakthroughts, that in a few years that can become a real thing, etc. They just need to publish some impressive sounding papers a little bit once in a while and the thing keeps rolling. May be it is just me but when I see all these quantum computing pseudo results I wonder how people can believe this thing has any hope to work at all so much it is ungrounded to reality. All in all, the whole fundation of the quantum treatment is flawed in my humble opinion because of the idea of wave-packet collapse, when a measurement is done, is by itself completely unsound. However they assume it holds perfectly and base a ton on speculative calculations assuming that principle holds perfectly which is far from true. Successful engineering and technology development is not done having a crazy idea that holds only based on a number of highly incertain assumptions but it needs solid ideas developed incrementally iterating from things we already know. First electricity, then basic electronics, the diode, then bipolar transistors, then J-FET, then MOSFET and so on.

blastonico

No idea whether the claim is right or wrong, but this processor package is beautiful.

2OEH8eoCRo0

> Microsoft's researchers made a basic programming mistake by evaluating the array index – the number identifying a value's position in an array – instead of the value to which the index refers.

rav

Not the first time that a Nature publication's "too good to be true" results turn out to be based on simple programming errors... Nature 532, 210 (2016) was retracted after it was shown that a hand-coded gradient function, used in gradient descent, had a simple sign error (details in arXiv 2003.05808).