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“I swear to God, I almost broke my damn neck looking up at everybody at Q+AI/PQC+IQT. Three straight days, just staring up. Looking like a little kid who lost his mom at Walmart. At the end of the day, I might be the 2nd least qualified person in quantum, but I’m closer to the physics than all of y’all. Look, I’m damn near microscopic!”

– Brian “The Kevin Hart of Quantum (but 3 inches taller)” Siegelwax

This week’s IQT News:

• Thanks to Speakers, Sponsors & Attendees
• SEALSQ Highlights Quantum Sovereignty and Resilience at Q+AI 3.0 Event in New York
• IQT Sunday Edition
• A Superconducting Bus Architecture
• Dominant Trends & Commercialization Leaders in Quantum Chemistry & Quantum Life Sciences
• Dominant Trends & Commercialization Leaders in Quantum Finance

This week’s The Premium Quantum Dragon (Substack):

• QILaplace.jl
• IonQ owns The Quantum Insider.
• Quantum Native
• RhymeQ’s Rhyme
• From IonQ Rumor to IonQ Cover-Up
• A Banned SDK
• Dynex Platform

In this edition:

• How to pack wrinkle-free?
• QTD Systems
• Lady Liberty
• Do I speak Spanish? ¿Hablo español?
• Whaddaya mean you trap a photon?
• OQC’s Best Business Card Award
• Rise of the Machines
• Spooky Action in Close Proximity
• Post-Quantum Finance: Protecting the Future of Money
• Mini-Podcasts
• BTQ Technologies’ MIMIQ™ Emulator is now on qBraid
• Expected –> Bet
• The spookiest ideas in quantum
• I’m a role model!
• The Dataset That Can Never Get Bigger
• Part of Israel’s self-proclaimed quantum edge was bought by Intel.
• $6.3 Billion Gone. No Quantum Computer Required.
• Familiar Engineering Problems
• Essential Graduate Physics: Quantum Mechanics
• Alice & Bob vs Quera, Anthropic, and Harvard
• It’s a trap!
• Quantum Kaggle
• “Anecdotally, basically nobody knows about superposition masking.”
• Informaq – Bitesize Quantum Insights
• Is Our Universe a Hologram? Juan Maldacena Explains
• Quantum Field Theory, Special Relativity, and Royal Water
• Yuval Boger’s Microscopic Magnets
• Dr. Constantin Gonciulea’s and Charlee Stefanski’s Galton board
• It’s not cliché if you’re first.
• The Single Greatest Joke Ever Told in Quantum
• A Superconducting Bus Architecture
• Alice and Bob were born in 1978.
• Behold the power of quantum cheese!
• MIT Technology Review is seeking pitches for an upcoming issue.
• QQQQQQQuantum Emerges from Stealth
• I found Quantum Pirate Captain Sergio Gago!
• Demonstrating Superposition Macroscopically
• Simulating MRI Scans
• Quantum Noise Detector

How to pack wrinkle-free?

This has nothing to do with quantum technologies or even quantum mechanics, but quantum folks travel. In contrast, I rarely leave my home. But I shoved a suit jacket, slacks, dress shirts, dress shoes, a tie, and even a bow tie (I was worried about not being memorable) into a backpack using this technique, and no one accused me of looking homeless.

QTD Systems

A couple of hours prior to boarding the Q+AI/PQC+IQT dinner cruise, I was honored to be given a personal guided tour of QTD Systems by CEO Peter Feldman. The executive summary is that if I had any kind of quantum technology toys, I would trust QTD as a custodian. They were even able to keep The Quantum Dragon out; is that not impressive?

Lady Liberty

I’ve taken a dinner cruise around lower Manhattan before, and I knew that Lady Liberty would be the star of the night. Except that she wasn’t. The people and the conversations are easily what made the evening truly memorable. Living (and eating) in the Philippines, I dare say the food was up there, too. That said, The Quantum Dragon found her fake torch hilarious, so I took a photo.

Do I speak Spanish? ¿Hablo español?

While sailing around lower Manhattan, I received the suggestion/request for Spanish language content. Unfortunately, if I’m lucky, I still speak Spanish like a toddler. However, with the help of Google Translate and some AI proofreaders, maybe The Quantum Dragon can start being multilingual. For starters, how’s this translation?

Choose Your Own Quantum Adventure with Dirac-3S

Had you stopped by Platinum Sponsor QCi’s booth, you could’ve picked up a QR code that grants you 10 minutes on Dirac-3S. Why is that a big deal? Because I once did a really, really interesting experiment on its predecessor, Dirac-3. Plus, the product spotlight shares the exact same title with my 2nd book, so I’m a little biased toward thinking that’s awesome.

Whaddaya mean you trap a photon?

The image above holds the distinction of being the only photograph I took at Q+AI/PQC+IQT. I was chatchitting at the memQ booth, heard something like “trap a photon,” and did a double-take. I’ve always compared photons to teenagers, going wherever the heck they want all willy nilly, but apparently, memQ can get them to behave. Outstanding.

OQC’s Best Business Card Award

OQC’s “The Coaxmon” metallic business card is the best I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s certainly the first I’ve had with a qubit topology precision-cut into it. I’d sure like to show you an image of it, but, unfortunately, they made it golden colored so The Quantum Dragon has already stolen it from me and hidden it somewhere in his cave. I ain’t going in there.

Rise of the Machines: Automated Bring-Up

I’d like to thank Dr. Michaela Eichinger, Product Solutions Physicist at Quantum Machines, Jay Guilmart, Lead Product Manager of Quantum Computing at Q-CTRL, Stefania Lazar, Senior Product Manager Quantum Technologies at Zurich Instruments, and Anurag Saha Roy, Chief Product Officer at Qruise, for being the best panel an unqualified moderator could possibly hope for. Some attendees actually seem to have thought I knew what I was doing up there, but nope! The cooperation and consideration they extended to one another was all their doing.

Spooky Action in Close Proximity

The only suggestion I would’ve had to improve PQC+IQT would’ve been to turn off the lights and have the speakers hold flashlights under their chins. The scheduling of so much “doom and gloom” talk right before Halloween was absolutely inspiring. There were solutions, of course, but the framing of the problem was better than any haunted house I’ve ever been to.

Post-Quantum Finance: Protecting the Future of Money

I’d like to thank Rajeev Bamra, Head of Digital Economy Strategy at Moody’s, for the fireside chat. I also have to thank Erik Anspach for the assist preparing for it. It’s always great when the audience engages, and when emcee Dr. Anastasia Marchenkova opened up the chat to questions, the audience engaged.

Mini-Podcasts

I’d like to thank Carlos Moreira, Founder and CEO of 3 NASDAQ companies (WISeKey ($WQEY), SEALSQ ($LAES), and WISeSat ($SAIQ)), Simon Pamplin, CTO at Certes, Dr. Reza Nejabati, Head of Quantum Research & Quantum Labs at Cisco, and Dr. Garfield Jones, Senior Vice President Global Strategy & Research at QuSecure, for recording on-site mini-podcasts. I’m processing them as fast as my laptop and broadband will allow. Thanks also to Sebastian Hassinger of the New Quantum Era podcast, who was also recording on-premises, for his cooperation regarding the use of the available office spaces. Also, stay subscribed for links to content recorded onsite by Antonella Navarro of The Quantum Revolution.

BTQ Technologies’ MIMIQ™ Emulator is now on qBraid

I’m killing 2 proverbial birds with 1 equally proverbial stone here, sharing great appreciation for Dr. Anastasia Marchenkova’s and BTQ’s awesome hospitality while simultaneously shouting out The Dracarys Award-winning MIMIQ. To date, despite evaluating literally hundreds of products, I’ve still only bestowed this recognition 4 times.

Expected –> Bet

For “What’s happening in quantum, and what it means for the future,” Mark McGuire of QuicklyQuantum used an article format that I haven’t encountered before. The question is: who’s going to bookmark this article and check back in the future to see if he will have been correct? While you’re at it, double-check to see if my use of future perfect tense is correct.

The spookiest ideas in quantum

This ought to have been in last week’s edition, prior to Halloween, but the irony is nevertheless worthy of a late inclusion. Quantum mechanics isn’t nearly as spooky as Qiskit’s legendary #breakingchanges, which can give you quite the fright depending on the proximity of your deadline. Like a poltergeist’s shenanigans, your code will break despite you not changing anything.

I’m a role model!

Jennifer Tran writes in “I tried to break a quantum computer (sort of)” that she’s trying to do what I’ve been trying to do for years. She’s quite a bit gentler than I tend to be, but it probably took me a while to catch my stride. Who remembers? My favorite stress test was probably when I generated a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with a negative temperature, which obviously indicated that something was askew.

The Dataset That Can Never Get Bigger

Classical machine learning, quantum machine learning, artificial intelligence, and so on and so forth, but Mark McGuire gives The Quantum Dragon a shoutout at the end, and now he’s breathing hot exhalation on the back of my head and neck until I link to this article in this newsletter. I probably would’ve included it anyway for the phrase “timely means before the sun explodes,” but now we’ll never know.

Part of Israel’s self-proclaimed quantum edge was bought by Intel.

Kudos to Marin Ivezic for detecting the cruel irony in the Israel Innovation Authority announcing that Israel’s quantum edge is software and control on the same day we learned that US-based Intel intends to buy Israel-based Classiq. We might as well add salt to the wound and note that Quantum Machines states that it is an American company, not an Israeli one.

$6.3 Billion Gone. No Quantum Computer Required.

Qtonic Quantum made an astute observation: quantum computing may be a looming threat to cybersecurity, but don’t forget about all the other threats that are out there in the meantime. For that matter, it looks like this North Korean attack on Binance would’ve succeeded even if post-quantum cryptography had been firmly in place, as the attack didn’t employ quantum computation.

Familiar Engineering Problems

Berenice Baker wrote that “Quantum moves into the datacentre, bringing some familiar engineering problems,” but that misses the true story. What I learned during my aforementioned tour of QTD Systems is that there are familiar engineering problems, of course, but there are also unfamiliar engineering problems, and those are downright fascinating.

Essential Graduate Physics: Quantum Mechanics

With the disclaimer that I haven’t gone through this course myself, this appears to be a free, downloadable course from Stony Brook University’s Academic Commons that has been downloaded 24,716 times as of this writing. 10 chapters will consume only 5.3 MB, and the content is fresh: published sometime in 2026.

What the heck is a Scanning Tunneling Microscope?

I’d love to explain it but, thankfully, Prof. Thomas G. Wong shared this video, which has been viewed 134,000 times and almost certainly does a better job of it than I could possibly do textually. The Quantum Dragon would fare no better, as he just waves his hand over something like a Jedi mind trick, so he doesn’t really know how it works either.

Alice & Bob vs Quera, Anthropic, and Harvard

I’m not commenting on the science here in any way, nor am I picking sides. I’m merely applauding any quantum company taking a swing at another. Red dragons breathe fire, dontcha know, and it could be fun to observe the defenders here taking a swing back. Let’s push both teams to their limits, know what I mean? This post may require an X account.

It’s a trap!

It’s probably fair to say that invoking Admiral Ackbar virtually guarantees inclusion in this newsletter. I could also include this article by Dr. Anastasia Marchenkova for the line, “Why Does One Gate Eat 95% of a Quantum Computer?”, because I can imagine The Quantum Dragon illustrating that, but George Lucas Star Wars can’t be beat.

Quantum Kaggle

I did it backwards, AI –> quantum, instead of quantum –> AI like everyone else. It was back in my AI days that I first learned about Kaggle’s “crowdsourced benchmarks, competitions, and hackathons.” “Google Quantum AI – Verifiable Quantum Circuit Compilation” is somehow the first quantum event I’ve encountered, and $150,000 is apparently up for grabs.

“Anecdotally, basically nobody knows about superposition masking.”

If Craig Gidney is going to write that no one knows what superposition masking is, and seeing that I’ve never heard of it myself, I might as well help spread awareness. You’re welcome. And not that he needs them, but I’m awarding Mr. Gidney some admittedly worthless bonus points for the subtle diabetes reference. That’s a first.

Informaq – Bitesize Quantum Insights

Each individual post might be bitesized, but there’s a seemingly neverending stream of them. If you want to know absolutely everything that’s going on in quantum, and you want to keep scrolling until the skin on your fingertip is raw, then following this Bluesky account might be right for you. Gee whiz, it’s overwhelming.

Is Our Universe a Hologram? Juan Maldacena Explains

The Quantum Kid has 122,000 subscribers on YouTube, so you’ve probably already seen this. But just in case you haven’t… um… hello? Go watch it now, like and subscribe, and I promise this newsletter will still be here when you get back. It’s worth noting that this is really well illustrated, too; it’s not just a bunch of questions and answers.

“Why 1440? The printing press was invented around the year 1440, spreading knowledge to the masses and changing the course of history. More facts: In every day, there are 1,440 minutes. We’re here to make each one count.”

Quantum Field Theory, Special Relativity, and Royal Water

1440 is one of my sources of general news, and I was pleasantly surprised the other day to find quite a bit of real estate dedicated to topics that we all know and love. What’s special about this, though, is that the subscribers are presumably general science and technology enthusiasts, and they’ve now been exposed to quantum joy, if they hadn’t been already.

https://a.co/d/0i1fndcr

Yuval Boger’s Microscopic Magnets

As I continue my journey through “Quantum Bits,” I came across this interesting analogy for spin qubits. The electrons themselves are either spin-up or spin-down, and we can assign those states north and south just as easily as we can assign them 0 and 1, but the magnet analogy probably works better once we start talking about how they are controlled.

https://a.co/d/07IJjYvD

Dr. Constantin Gonciulea’s and Charlee Stefanski’s Galton board

I’ve used Plinko in an unpublished analogy, but “Building Quantum Software in Python: A developer’s guide” has the first Galton board analogy I’ve encountered. The fundamental dynamic is the same with both, with the primary difference being arbitrary starting points with the former and a relatively static starting point with the latter.

https://a.co/d/0aci3p73

It’s not cliché if you’re first.

I don’t have a photo of me reading Dr. Bob “The Godfather of The Quantum Dragon” Sutor’s “Dancing with Qubits” because my copy is digital, but I’m going to start reviewing it anyway. My first observation is that Chapter 1 starts with Prof. Richard Feynman’s legendary quote, which seems cliche these days, until you remember that the 1st edition of “Dancing with Qubits” preceded most of what’s currently out there. I only remember “Mike & Ike” and Jack Hidary’s book, to be honest with you. So, instead of being cliché, this quote is actually a reminder that The Godfather is one of the pioneers of contemporary quantum literature.

The Single Greatest Joke Ever Told in Quantum

D-Wave is still banned from The Quantum Dragon because its non-coherent annealers just don’t belong here, and I still haven’t seen anything superconducting from them yet, but CEO Alan Baratz saying that there’s “way too much hype in the quantum space right now” is way too hilarious to not share. Thanks so much to Jane Lanhee Lee for gifting this quote to the world! This link may require a LinkedIn account.

A Superconducting Bus Architecture

The Quantum Dragon had just finished up a visit to Qarakal Quantum in Tel Aviv, Israel, and he decided to fly over to Europe and visit his old stomping grounds. You know, pillage some villages for old times’ sake. As he was flying high over Istanbul, Turkey, he realized he couldn’t make out too many of the landmarks on the ground, so he flew down to a university, hoping to find some physicists who wouldn’t be terrified of him. They directed him to the nearest bus terminal.

Alice and Bob were born in 1978.

I like to relay this factoid from time to time, simply because it’s interesting. In the case of Alice & Bob, they’re telling the story (albeit admitting this factoid) to explain how the name of the company came about. Interestingly, they acknowledge that the company is often assumed to be a cryptography company, even though it isn’t.

Behold the power of quantum cheese!

Not a huge fan of PsiQuantum’s Construct given how it was announced, but I can’t ignore “Generating Realistic Materials with the Quantum Cheese algorithm.” The implication, of course, is that PsiQuantum’s first warehouse-sized photonic quantum computer needs to be named Bacon. Damn the cost, how can you not run a Quantum Cheese algorithm with Bacon?

MIT Technology Review is seeking pitches for an upcoming issue.

The theme is Automation. I was literally speaking about automation just last week with the awesome panel of Dr. Eichinger, Mr. Guilmart, Ms. Lazar, and Mr. Saha Roy. The question is whether anyone out there wants to write about such things for $1 to $2 per word. The initial deadline for pitches is Friday, November 13, so think fast!

Dr. Bob “The Godfather of The Quantum Dragon” Sutor

QQQQQQQuantum Emerges from Stealth

One of these days, I’m going to take one of Dr. Sutor’s snarky posts and turn it into reality. I kinda sorta wanna found a company named QQQQQQQuantum in northeastern Idaho just to put together a pitch deck and try to raise pre-seed money. The spiritual roadmap should be fairly easy to come up with. This link may require a LinkedIn account.

I found Quantum Pirate Captain Sergio Gago!

You thought the final edition of the pioneering Quantum Pirates newsletter was the end, didn’t you? You thought he’d damn the cannonballs and sail full speed ahead into Davy Jones’ locker? Well, it turns out that old pirates never die… they become consultants! You can find him staying with his nephew in The Quantum Dragon’s cave.

Demonstrating Superposition Macroscopically

Prof. Tom Wong shows us how the spinning of a thaumatrope illustrates superposition. The 2 images appear to be superimposed until you “measure” them by stopping spinning. Perhaps more impressively, he shows us what a thaumatrope is. I can’t say it had been in my vocabulary. This link may require an X account.

Simulating MRI Scans

While this isn’t the most exciting video to watch, it gets interesting if you can persevere. It’s a use case I haven’t encountered before, and even though no claim of quantum advantage is made at the scale that this is being simulated, you are shown the exponential scaling problem of doing this classically. I appreciate the invitation to try this ourselves on Qollab, which I will certainly be doing.

Image generated by an AI model provided by Microsoft Copilot.

Quantum Noise Detector

Alan Ho and Prof. Michael Biercuk inspired the Resuscitated Quantum Bullshit Detector, but the original(?) has resurfaced on Bluesky. It’s back to reposting a simple “bullshit” or “not bullshit,” so The Quantum Dragon will continue to monitor for challenges, controversies, and debates under this new name from Dr. Bob Sutor.

• Mackenzie Tatananni of Barron’s expressed skepticism that Intel’s acquisition of Classiq will elevate the former among the top players in the industry.
• Michael Spencer writes that Intel’s acquisition of Classiq includes an “egregious conflict of interest.”