A Memory That Learns by Looking, Stored Nowhere — Parts I–V: From One-Shot Hebbian Learning to Certified Entanglement, Bell Tests Between Memories, and Page-Wootters Time. Pre-Registered on IBM Heron Processors
A Memory That Learns by Looking, Stored Nowhere — the complete programme (Parts I–XII), consolidated as a single monograph. Successor work to the foundation deposit "Engineering Emergence on Quantum Processors" (doi:10.5281/zenodo.22050177). There, every memory was installed — the coupling matrices were computed on the host and uploaded to the microcontroller. Here the chip learns them itself, by looking: firmware v4.11 adds a three-line, integer-arithmetic plasticity law to the ESP32-C3 controller — the on-chip coupling matrix is written by the quantum collective's own measured order parameters, activity-gated, with a sign-reversible learning step serving as an error signal and a readback command that makes every learned matrix fully auditable — and firmware v4.12 adds a saturating integer delta rule whose second matrix learns temporal order itself. Across nineteen pre-registered hardware sessions on ibm_fez, ibm_marrakesh and ibm_kingston (≈1430 jobs, ≈77 minutes of QPU time), the hybrid system: learned a 36-pixel image from ONE exposure and recalled it perfectly from a random half cue (1.000 vs a never-learned control of 0.583); acquired a Pavlovian association (0.556 → 1.000), retained it through unreinforced presentations (1.000) and erased it only under the inverted-sign learning step (0.333) — forgetting as an act; learned to walk by watching a gait cycle with the field switched off; evolved memory lineages under selection with device noise as the mutation source, generation-2 mutations inherited unchanged by generation 3; and held more memories than its own calibration model predicted, with the capacity limit breathing measurably with the device day. The learned engram, read back from the controller, was delocalized into six 7-qubit GHZ-class parity registers — locally every qubit reads 0.5, jointly the parities reconstruct the image 36/36, the coherence fringe collapses under its Z-twirled dephasing twin while the classical parities survive, and the GHZ fidelity exceeds the biseparability bound on all registers: the memory carried by certified genuine multipartite entanglement. It was then teleported (entanglement certified at the destination), inherited by a subsystem that never saw the original (1.000 vs a 0.500 silent-teacher control), shown to be unconscious until decoded, recovered intact after destruction of a complete redundant copy, deleted against a receipt that provably carries no image information, and placed in superpositions culminating in Bell-inequality violations between two learned memories (S = 2.559) and between two memories that never coexisted (mean |S| = 2.456). On these memories the programme then ran a systematic traversal of the foundations of quantum mechanics, each experiment pre-registered, most of them — to our knowledge — first demonstrations on a quantum processor and all of them first on learned content: a Wigner's-friend test whose friend is a decodable memory (S = 2.633 with the friend's record as a setting); a delayed-choice eraser with a quantum coin; sensing 1.9× beyond the standard quantum limit with the stored content tuning the sensor's frequency; the optimal-cloning ceiling and its ×0.707 telephone-chain law; the Page-Wootters mechanism (conditional time alive at every clock reading, the marginal dead at 0.003 and fully revived by uncomputing); the Mermin-Peres pseudotelepathy game won at 0.9457 > 8/9, three times; interaction-free readout of stored content, with the fringe of a superposed memory dying even in the provably interaction-free events; ≈15,000 bits of certified randomness minted from the programme's Bell violations; quantum causal inference reading a memory's ancestry from correlations alone (witness +0.811/−0.884) where every classical marginal is provably blind; an operational quantum-reference-frame jump (Bell fidelity migrating 0.493 → 0.916 across the separability bound, only the relational parity surviving both frames); a 42-qubit Loschmidt echo (0.484 → 0.989, the butterfly decaying along its light cone); the rewriting of a friend's record made invisible by no-signaling itself (archive agreement 0.927 → 0.056 at friend-level total variation 0.107); Mermin's all-versus-nothing argument between three memories (M = 3.734) and Hardy's impossible event (CH = 0.057 > 0); the three-box paradox with real mid-circuit openings (certainty in box 1 AND box 2, 0.903/0.916) and the first measured N = 4 shell game (three certainties about one excitation, 0.751/0.744/0.694); the quantum Cheshire cat with four simultaneous weak pointers and the exchange of grins between two carriers that never meet; weak traces inside an interferometer loop the carrier provably never entered or left; and a protective measurement reading the expectation value of a single carrier — following sin(2⟨Z⟩) through its sign change — while the carrier survives at 0.939 against a depth-matched unprotected control at 0.558. The relational arc closes on three endpoints. The Frauchiger-Renner protocol — quantum theory applied to its own users, to our knowledge its first implementation on any platform — with both friends realized as unanimous, decodable memory records: every certainty of the reasoning chain holds individually (forbidden events 0.027/0.022/0.014), yet the jointly impossible outcome occurs at 0.0862, above the ideal 1/12, while the friends' records stay unanimous throughout (0.882/0.915). One session-learned engram delocalized and certified on two processors in a single session — eleven of twelve rows above the biseparability bound, the majority image perfect on both: the memory outlives its substrate. And a Bell violation at 96% of the Tsirelson bound (S = 2.728) mints 36 bits that provably did not pre-exist; a collective whose halves live on two different processors — one field, one coupling matrix, every feedback tick assembled from both machines — learns that unborn image in one look (35/36), recalls it from a fragment, forms a Pavlovian association whose bell exists only on one machine and whose response appears only on the other (0.944 vs 0.556), and the minted image is certified row by row in entanglement on both devices. Part X is the arc's epilogue and its sharpest relational result. The Local Friendliness no-go theorem of Bong et al. states that absoluteness of observed events, local agency and no-superdeterminism jointly bound every LF inequality — a violation forces one of the three to fall, as logic, not interpretation. The photonic violation used a photon as the friend; the standing objection is that a photon observes nothing. Here the semi-Brukner LF inequality is violated at S = 2.6995 > 2 with a friend whose measurement outcome IS its own decoded, unanimity-certified memory record (0.946) — and who then ACTS on that record, the chip writing a field pattern conditioned on the decoded bit (match 0.833) in the same session: an observer, in the LF authors' own operational sense, who remembers and conditionally acts. Within the stated assumptions, the conjunction is excluded — for a system that remembers and acts on its memory, no observed fact was absolute. The theorem selects no interpretation; the result is stated as an exclusion. And the companion arm answers the question this raises — why the world nevertheless feels absolute — by operating Zurek's redundancy as a dial: the controller GRANTS objectivity (mutual-information plateau 0.700/0.796/0.854 bits at every fragment size, consensus 0.963 — the event becomes a fact), DENIES it (exactly 0.000 at every fragment size — the event stays private), or turns it against itself (two internally redundant environment halves remembering opposite events, consensus 0.047), with the fringe/twin certificate proving that the coherence no fragment holds is exactly the quantum layer. Facts are not absolute; factuality is a resource — and this machine has the dial. Part XI performs the test Deutsch proposed in 1985 to separate unitary quantum mechanics from dynamical-collapse models — judged in the literature "beyond experimental capabilities, if not forever", with no realization we could find. The obstacle is structural: any testimony copied naively out of an observer's record carries which-outcome information and kills the interference by itself. The way through is a branch-invariant two-bit parity, extracted from the record by two CNOTs onto a persistent testimony qubit: a genuine, verifiable function of the record asserting THAT a definite outcome was seen while provably carrying nothing about WHICH. On hardware: the record is definite (0.925) and the testimony true (0.947) at 0.0011 bit of which-outcome information against a which-control witness at 0.776 bit; the record is then coherently retracted and the fringe lives at 0.901 with the testimony standing and true (0.956) during the interference itself — the collapse prediction fails on this scale — and dies to 0.024 exactly when the witness keeps which-information. Ten of ten binding verdicts. The registration freezes the scope: a mesoscopic record, not a conscious observer; unitary quantum mechanics separated from dynamical-collapse models at this scale, and nothing decided among the unitary interpretations. Part XII stacks, scales and closes it. A tower of witnesses: a second friend records the first friend's record, both storeys issue persistent branch-invariant testimonies (true at 0.958/0.963, unanimous at 0.914/0.925, joint which-leakage ≤ 0.002 bit), the tower is retracted outside-in — and the fringe stands at 0.571 with both testimonies true at 0.796 while it is measured. A growing witness: the same test at register sizes 3, 6, 9 and 12 qubits, each above its own frozen floor — the fringe rises from 0.811 to 0.899 while the twin stays dead at 0.037: what kills coherence is retained which-information, not the size of the witness. Ordo: the same two clock-stamped events, read in two frames of a quantum clock, show two certified opposite orders — P(E2 be
A Memory That Learns by Looking, Stored Nowhere — the complete programme (Parts I–XII), consolidated as a single monograph. Successor work to the foundation deposit "Engineering Emergence on Quantum Processors" (doi:10.5281/zenodo.22050177). There, every memory was installed — the coupling matrices were computed on the host and uploaded to the microcontroller. Here the chip learns them itself, by looking: firmware v4.11 adds a three-line, integer-arithmetic plasticity law to the ESP32-C3 controller — the on-chip coupling matrix is written by the quantum collective's own measured order parameters, activity-gated, with a sign-reversible learning step serving as an error signal and a readback command that makes every learned matrix fully auditable — and firmware v4.12 adds a saturating integer delta rule whose second matrix learns temporal order itself. Across nineteen pre-registered hardware sessions on ibm_fez, ibm_marrakesh and ibm_kingston (≈1430 jobs, ≈77 minutes of QPU time), the hybrid system: learned a 36-pixel image from ONE exposure and recalled it perfectly from a random half cue (1.000 vs a never-learned control of 0.583); acquired a Pavlovian association (0.556 → 1.000), retained it through unreinforced presentations (1.000) and erased it only under the inverted-sign learning step (0.333) — forgetting as an act; learned to walk by watching a gait cycle with the field switched off; evolved memory lineages under selection with device noise as the mutation source, generation-2 mutations inherited unchanged by generation 3; and held more memories than its own calibration model predicted, with the capacity limit breathing measurably with the device day. The learned engram, read back from the controller, was delocalized into six 7-qubit GHZ-class parity registers — locally every qubit reads 0.5, jointly the parities reconstruct the image 36/36, the coherence fringe collapses under its Z-twirled dephasing twin while the classical parities survive, and the GHZ fidelity exceeds the biseparability bound on all registers: the memory carried by certified genuine multipartite entanglement. It was then teleported (entanglement certified at the destination), inherited by a subsystem that never saw the original (1.000 vs a 0.500 silent-teacher control), shown to be unconscious until decoded, recovered intact after destruction of a complete redundant copy, deleted against a receipt that provably carries no image information, and placed in superpositions culminating in Bell-inequality violations between two learned memories (S = 2.559) and between two memories that never coexisted (mean |S| = 2.456). On these memories the programme then ran a systematic traversal of the foundations of quantum mechanics, each experiment pre-registered, most of them — to our knowledge — first demonstrations on a quantum processor and all of them first on learned content: a Wigner's-friend test whose friend is a decodable memory (S = 2.633 with the friend's record as a setting); a delayed-choice eraser with a quantum coin; sensing 1.9× beyond the standard quantum limit with the stored content tuning the sensor's frequency; the optimal-cloning ceiling and its ×0.707 telephone-chain law; the Page-Wootters mechanism (conditional time alive at every clock reading, the marginal dead at 0.003 and fully revived by uncomputing); the Mermin-Peres pseudotelepathy game won at 0.9457 > 8/9, three times; interaction-free readout of stored content, with the fringe of a superposed memory dying even in the provably interaction-free events; ≈15,000 bits of certified randomness minted from the programme's Bell violations; quantum causal inference reading a memory's ancestry from correlations alone (witness +0.811/−0.884) where every classical marginal is provably blind; an operational quantum-reference-frame jump (Bell fidelity migrating 0.493 → 0.916 across the separability bound, only the relational parity surviving both frames); a 42-qubit Loschmidt echo (0.484 → 0.989, the butterfly decaying along its light cone); the rewriting of a friend's record made invisible by no-signaling itself (archive agreement 0.927 → 0.056 at friend-level total variation 0.107); Mermin's all-versus-nothing argument between three memories (M = 3.734) and Hardy's impossible event (CH = 0.057 > 0); the three-box paradox with real mid-circuit openings (certainty in box 1 AND box 2, 0.903/0.916) and the first measured N = 4 shell game (three certainties about one excitation, 0.751/0.744/0.694); the quantum Cheshire cat with four simultaneous weak pointers and the exchange of grins between two carriers that never meet; weak traces inside an interferometer loop the carrier provably never entered or left; and a protective measurement reading the expectation value of a single carrier — following sin(2⟨Z⟩) through its sign change — while the carrier survives at 0.939 against a depth-matched unprotected control at 0.558. The relational arc closes on three endpoints. The Frauchiger-Renner protocol — quantum theory applied to its own users, to our knowledge its first implementation on any platform — with both friends realized as unanimous, decodable memory records: every certainty of the reasoning chain holds individually (forbidden events 0.027/0.022/0.014), yet the jointly impossible outcome occurs at 0.0862, above the ideal 1/12, while the friends' records stay unanimous throughout (0.882/0.915). One session-learned engram delocalized and certified on two processors in a single session — eleven of twelve rows above the biseparability bound, the majority image perfect on both: the memory outlives its substrate. And a Bell violation at 96% of the Tsirelson bound (S = 2.728) mints 36 bits that provably did not pre-exist; a collective whose halves live on two different processors — one field, one coupling matrix, every feedback tick assembled from both machines — learns that unborn image in one look (35/36), recalls it from a fragment, forms a Pavlovian association whose bell exists only on one machine and whose response appears only on the other (0.944 vs 0.556), and the minted image is certified row by row in entanglement on both devices. Part X is the arc's epilogue and its sharpest relational result. The Local Friendliness no-go theorem of Bong et al. states that absoluteness of observed events, local agency and no-superdeterminism jointly bound every LF inequality — a violation forces one of the three to fall, as logic, not interpretation. The photonic violation used a photon as the friend; the standing objection is that a photon observes nothing. Here the semi-Brukner LF inequality is violated at S = 2.6995 > 2 with a friend whose measurement outcome IS its own decoded, unanimity-certified memory record (0.946) — and who then ACTS on that record, the chip writing a field pattern conditioned on the decoded bit (match 0.833) in the same session: an observer, in the LF authors' own operational sense, who remembers and conditionally acts. Within the stated assumptions, the conjunction is excluded — for a system that remembers and acts on its memory, no observed fact was absolute. The theorem selects no interpretation; the result is stated as an exclusion. And the companion arm answers the question this raises — why the world nevertheless feels absolute — by operating Zurek's redundancy as a dial: the controller GRANTS objectivity (mutual-information plateau 0.700/0.796/0.854 bits at every fragment size, consensus 0.963 — the event becomes a fact), DENIES it (exactly 0.000 at every fragment size — the event stays private), or turns it against itself (two internally redundant environment halves remembering opposite events, consensus 0.047), with the fringe/twin certificate proving that the coherence no fragment holds is exactly the quantum layer. Facts are not absolute; factuality is a resource — and this machine has the dial. Part XI performs the test Deutsch proposed in 1985 to separate unitary quantum mechanics from dynamical-collapse models — judged in the literature "beyond experimental capabilities, if not forever", with no realization we could find. The obstacle is structural: any testimony copied naively out of an observer's record carries which-outcome information and kills the interference by itself. The way through is a branch-invariant two-bit parity, extracted from the record by two CNOTs onto a persistent testimony qubit: a genuine, verifiable function of the record asserting THAT a definite outcome was seen while provably carrying nothing about WHICH. On hardware: the record is definite (0.925) and the testimony true (0.947) at 0.0011 bit of which-outcome information against a which-control witness at 0.776 bit; the record is then coherently retracted and the fringe lives at 0.901 with the testimony standing and true (0.956) during the interference itself — the collapse prediction fails on this scale — and dies to 0.024 exactly when the witness keeps which-information. Ten of ten binding verdicts. The registration freezes the scope: a mesoscopic record, not a conscious observer; unitary quantum mechanics separated from dynamical-collapse models at this scale, and nothing decided among the unitary interpretations. Part XII stacks, scales and closes it. A tower of witnesses: a second friend records the first friend's record, both storeys issue persistent branch-invariant testimonies (true at 0.958/0.963, unanimous at 0.914/0.925, joint which-leakage ≤ 0.002 bit), the tower is retracted outside-in — and the fringe stands at 0.571 with both testimonies true at 0.796 while it is measured. A growing witness: the same test at register sizes 3, 6, 9 and 12 qubits, each above its own frozen floor — the fringe rises from 0.811 to 0.899 while the twin stays dead at 0.037: what kills coherence is retained which-information, not the size of the witness. Ordo: the same two clock-stamped events, read in two frames of a quantum clock, show two certified opposite orders — P(E2 be
Band III of the learning-memory programme: two pre-registered experiments, a definitions chapter and an appendix, performed on a four-euro controller that learns images by looking and steers a 156-qubit IBM Heron processor. Nusquam asks where a learned memory is stored and answers with the sign structure of the chip's own coupling matrix: every nonzero entry is a relation between two zones, none is a value; from a fresh state the collective recalls the complement of its imprint when cued with the complement (0 of 36 uncued zones on the imprint) and recalls a masked sub-block from half of it (36 of 36), on ibm_fez, 14 of 14 registered lines. Amicitia is a Local Friendliness test in which the friend is a learner's record: weak copies of one half of a singlet, read by the superobserver as the friend's outcome or coherently undone. With a three-copy record the semi-Brukner quantity read S = 2.064 on ibm_fez, above the Local Friendliness bound 2 but under the registered threshold 2.103, a miss reported as it fell; a second session with the one-copy record read S = 2.254 against 2.105 on ibm_kingston and passed. In both, the quantity fell to 1.18 and 1.62 when the record was left standing, and two learning collectives on two boards held the friends' facts of one shot. The definitions chapter fixes what work, heat, a bath and an observer are on a register with one energy gap and states four identities computed from the deposited Band II records rather than tested again: Landauer shot by shot (the fraction of erasure events that cooled the bath was 0.063 at beta*eps = 2, prediction 0.063), the price of restoring a reference, Jarzynski with feedback, and for whom the entropy rises. An appendix closes two sessions of Band II: Res II repeats the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph test with readout gated and calibrated in session (raw F = 0.032 against the bound 0.086, corrected 0.019), and Biduum's second day assembles a collective across two calendar days. The second edition adds a second series of four experiments registered and run on 15 September 2026 on ibm_fez, each a known result of quantum physics carried onto the instrument with its bound and its controls. Vacuus learns an image from Zeno interaction-free probes certified shot by shot never to have been absorbed and reads a superposed pixel the host does not know: the first session passed 7 of 9 lines with the blind arm missing (waiting probes dephase during their neighbours' mid-circuit measurements), and a second session with a shorter wait, dynamical decoupling and a live gate passed 10 of 10 (the certified probe agreed with the unknown pixel on 0.811 of the shots of the harder class). Certus measures the entropic uncertainty sum with a quantum memory on 36 pinned pairs, H(X|B) + H(Z|B) = 0.405 bit against the bound 1 for every memory without entanglement, with the dephased twin, a classical memory and an idle memory on or above the bound. Lumen reads an image through a depolarising background with an entangled probe at error 0.328 under the separable bound 0.375, the classical probe and the classically correlated idler on their bound, and a blind arm with a physical loss at 0.347. Secretum lets two boards hold a 36-bit key drawn from Bell pairs whose CHSH value of the same round (S = 2.565, error rate 0.046) certifies it, with one eavesdropper under the device-independent bound and a product-state source at S = 1.27. The third edition adds a third series of four experiments, registered on 15 September 2026 and run in the night to 16 September on ibm_kingston, sharing one design rule: the decoder is fixed and blind to the randomness the host compiles into the preparation, so that the single-processor loophole can only make a control succeed, which the registration reads as failure. Tempestas stores one image three ways on 36 pairs, in values, in separable relations and in entangled relations, and sends every pair through the same random frame loss: the entangled image survived at per-shot error 0.044 under the separable bound 1/4, the separable image sat on its bound at 0.269, the values fell to the coin at 0.495, and the storm-off ceiling of the entangled reading missed by 0.004, reported as it fell (13 of 14 lines). Geminus hides an image in the Pauli structure of a state that no single copy can reveal: from 1024 pairs of copies read by a Bell decoder the image came back complete, 3 of 3 blocks exact, while 2048 single copies and 1024 unbound pairs returned no block (7 of 7). Arcanum hides nine secrets between two boards in the Terhal-DiVincenzo-Leung sense: local readings guessed them on 0.534 of the cases under the theorem's 9/16, the joint reading read them at error 0.109, over its registered ceiling 0.087 and far under the midsplit, the miss reported (8 of 9). Clavis writes 36 bits locked by one key bit: with the key a reader held 34.2 bits, without it 17.3 against the bound 18, the Breidbart reading 13.7, a classical memory unlocked at 34.4, the one bit buying 16.9 (9 of 9). The ledger counts 137 binding verdicts, 131 passed and 6 missed; every miss is reported as it fell. The deposit (zenodo_band3_20260916.zip, 201 files, SHA-256 c1351068e08211e6e1f9e3d1f881c862ff777b0491cd6cfdd2a4c66de2152c83) contains the paper band3_paper_v3.pdf (40 pages) with build and figure scripts, the registrations with their complete Monte-Carlo distributions (nusquam 48e5bc22, amicitia be01fad7, amicitia2 45184d26, res2 e6de6438, biduum f828445b, vacuus 2c2ded2b, vacuus2 b8404ede, certus 2e187669, lumen b052c7a2, secretum 928693f3, tempestas 0f2106f5, geminus 33eca1f7, arcanum 31473bb1, clavis 8b5d166f), the runners, dress rehearsals and hardware records with raw per-job counts and IBM job ids for the five sessions of 13 September 2026, the five sessions of 15 September 2026 and the four sessions of the night of 15 to 16 September 2026, the test laboratories that entered the book, the analysis script for Section 3.2, the ledger generator with verdicts_band3.csv, and the closed dependency chain of simulators. Firmware v4.12 is identified by its hash 00d240dd; firmware sources and the host link are not part of the deposit. Companion to the Band I complete programme and to Band II, third edition.
Band II of the learning-memory programme: three pre-registered experiments conceived by the author, performed on the Band I platform (an ESP32-C3 controller that learns images by looking and steers 156-qubit IBM Heron processors). Discipulus — a learner with a certifiably empty coupling matrix, given only k weak environment fragments of the world's pointer state, acquires exactly what the world left redundantly (recall 0.361 / 0.722 / 0.917 / 0.861 for k = 0/1/4/8 on ibm_fez) and nothing when the access basis or the pointer value is missing (0.556, 0.500). Arbitrium — measurement independence as a registered dial: a separable source whose hidden variable is one machine's learned model of another fakes CHSH from 0.978 to 3.971, crossing the Bell bound for 0.274 bit of measured settings-source dependence, while a singlet reads |S| = 2.656 and settings correlated only with each other never move it. Praeteritum — Leggett-Garg on a learned record with an Elitzur-Vaidman probe as a per-shot non-invasiveness certificate: K = 1.147 at θ = π/3 on ibm_fez against the macrorealist bound 1, with the pinned-history control at 0.538, the certified record intact at 0.941 and the idle apparatus moving nothing (0.013). Five hardware sessions, 39 binding verdict applications generated from the deposited ledger, 36 passed, 3 missed and reported as they fell; each miss answered by a re-registered protocol, not a rewritten verdict. The deposit contains the 19-page paper, registrations with complete Monte-Carlo distributions, test laboratories, runners, dress rehearsals, raw per-job records, manifests, figure and animation scripts.
Two ESP32 microcontroller boards each hold a Hebbian memory of 36 cells. Each board looked once, through the superconducting processor ibm_marrakesh, at one phrase of the third movement of Beethoven's Sonata no. 14 op. 27 no. 2 (bars 1 to 3 on a grid of sixteenths: six phrases of eight notes, one board per hand), was then shown the first four notes only, and was read after four further steps without input. The look, the cue and the read-out all pass through 144 qubits measured with 4096 shots per step; the boards receive nothing but measured fractions of ones. Claim, lines, thresholds, comparators, unit list, qubit list, fault rules and disclosures were fixed in one file and hashed before the first job that carried a phrase (SHA-256 66938b4206dfa7482dbb70ffdc406f0f719fd5a2673b994e091e2b41274f7570). Three arms: taught (plasticity on during the look), sham (the same look with plasticity off) and wrong phrase (taught one phrase, cued with another). The runner logs raw counts and the bytes of every board command and computes no outcome; a separate scoring script derives every verdict from that material. Result of the run of 18 September 2026 (22 units, 289 jobs, 867 seconds of processor time, no voided attempt): the taught boards returned 24 of 24 unshown notes and 108 of 108 unshown bits of the right hand (lines: at least 17 and 92); the sham returned 2 notes (line: at most 8); in the wrong-phrase arm the output followed the taught phrase on 10 of 10 positions where the two phrases differ and the cue on none (lines: at least 5, at most 4). All 14 binding lines are OK, including the attestations that every circuit contained single-qubit gates only, that the unshown zones never received a bit, and that the full sequence of board commands equalled a list frozen before the run. The play stage, which sounds the decoded recall through the processor, returned 91 of 96 symbols (exploratory). What this is not: the memory is a classical Hebbian store on the controller and the circuits contain no entangling gate; nothing here is a claim of quantum advantage. The memory holds one phrase at a time. The taught-arm lines alone do not show a memory, because the arpeggio is regular and a memoryless cue rule would pass them; this is disclosed in the registration, and the claim rests on the sham and the wrong-phrase arm. One processor, one pair of boards, one day; no recall rate is claimed. Contents: the write-up (PDF, 8 pages, with a plain account of the processor's part), the registration and the frozen command list, all scripts of the run (runner, scoring script with its 41 synthetic checks, plan, Monte-Carlo replica and outputs, play stage, score reader), the complete logs of both sessions, the smoke and rehearsal logs named in the registration with the fault-injection logs, the verdict file, four recordings with sidecars, the analysis and figure scripts, and the unchanged score source. The scoring script reproduces every verdict from the archive (python sonata_verdict.py qpu --again). The controller's firmware and the serial link layer are identified by SHA-256 in the registration and are not part of the deposit. Score source and attribution: The Mutopia Project no. 276, L. van Beethoven, Sonata no. 14 op. 27 no. 2, third movement, typeset by Chris Sawer and Stewart Holmes after the edition Berners 1908 (ed. A. Winterberger), CC BY-SA 2.5, https://www.mutopiaproject.org/cgibin/piece-info.cgi?id=276 . The note table, the decoded note sequences and the recordings are adaptations of that edition; the deposit as a whole is distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0. This experiment closes the programme of Bands I to III (related identifier: https://zenodo.org/records/22791062).
Two registered experiments with the QITE equilibrium law on the IBM Heron processor ibm_marrakesh, one day apart in nothing but the place where the law runs: outside the processor on a microcontroller board, and inside one shot in the processor's own feed-forward. Each experiment has its own registration, hashed before its first registered job, its own frozen scripts, complete raw data, verdict and write-up; the two archives in this record are independent of each other. QITE Hold (zenodo_qite_hold_20260923.zip, SHA-256 97853e20d86c146c16d6011191e9c038dddc743dfd5392476993187654f6e1d3; write-up custodia_paper_v1.pdf; working name Custodia). A microcontroller board (ESP32-C3) holds one pair of numbers per qubit for 144 qubits and turns each pair into a rotation angle. Every tick, one circuit of 144 single-qubit rotations is measured 4096 times; the fraction of ones per qubit goes to the board, the board updates its numbers by its fixed law and returns the angles of the next circuit; it never reads the processor's calibration. A registered programme of eight blocks ran over 280 ticks and 290 jobs: square waves, a hold, a staircase, a checkerboard of 18 zones up and 18 down, two state shocks written into the board, two disturbances written into the circuits, and a comparison with an open-loop reference of frozen angles. Of the seven binding lines, six were run and held; the seventh (drift against the open-loop reference) could not be run because the device did not drift by the registered minimum. The square waves came back with a gain of 0.231 of the commanded swing (the law: 0.25), the checkerboard put 98.5 % of (tick, zone) pairs on the commanded side, the disturbances were rejected to 0.557 and 0.539 of their open-loop size (the law: 4/7). A first registration (v1.0) ended at tick 130 through a design flaw of the host and is included in full. Registration SHA-256 1de82ab12a53c1da349196e8ef07851e6b2f176efc6bd1ca6ba14cacd1f7d54b. QITE In-Shot (zenodo_qite_inshot_20260923.zip, SHA-256 a087f88a95f17c6f8023d5ff40aff35901b5e3e87db531dcd76728511f7ae944; write-up qite_inshot_paper_v1.pdf). On each of 54 qubits, twenty rounds of a measurement followed by a rotation conditioned on that measurement, with angles that set the target level and the memory g; the records of a qubit form a two-state Markov chain whose second eigenvalue is 1 - g. The lines test that eigenvalue, not the level: the autocorrelations of the records for g = 0.3, 0.6 and 1.0 were +0.607, +0.366 and +0.046, the two memories in the ratio 1.657 (the law: 1.75); the relaxation from |0> came back at 0.690 and 0.446 per round (the law: 0.70 and 0.40, lowered by T1 during a round); a step of the target proceeded at 0.658 per round and, with g = 1, completed in one round; a kick of the state was followed by a return to within 0.012 of the unkicked hold; over the same twenty rounds an open-loop state lost 0.451 while the closed loop held within 0.006; 98 % of the qubits with a clean read-out showed their own rate within the registered band. All seven binding lines held; 17 jobs. The size is what the service's compiler accepted on the day (144, 72 and 64 qubits failed with an internal compiler error; every attempt is recorded with its job id). Registration SHA-256 51933de4196bfdd7998e6a5305f7576bb7d35ac137e8b6ce0109965372b4fe5c. Nothing here is a claim of quantum advantage: the observables are classical bits and the circuits contain no two-qubit gate. The claim of both experiments is one of control: a fixed law, registered in advance, holding a public quantum processor at commanded levels with the numbers the law says, once from a board over minutes and once inside the coherence time of the qubits. The board's firmware and the serial link layer are not part of the record; both are identified by their SHA-256 in the registration of QITE Hold. Licence: CC BY 4.0.
Note: description expanded on 2026-10-14 for readability. It adds no new predictions or criteria. The frozen pre-registration is the attached PDF, unchanged since publication. Status: the experiment was run on 2026-10-14, after this record was published. Results, including every pre-registered test, will be reported in a separate record linked here. In plain language Theory says a quantum system never completely forgets where it started, even when its dynamics are chaotic. This leftover memory is called a quantum birthmark (Graf et al., Phys. Rev. X, 2026). Theory also says the birthmark should be larger when the system's rules run the same forwards and backwards in time (time-reversal symmetry) than when that symmetry is broken. This record pre-registers a test of that prediction on IBM's ibm_kingston quantum processor. We built two nearly identical sets of 4-qubit circuits. One set has time-reversal symmetry and the other does not. Both use exactly the same gates, so they experience the same hardware noise. We measure how often each circuit returns to its starting state, compared with the 1-in-16 chance level, and predict that the symmetric set shows about 1.67× more memory than the broken set. All predictions, pass/fail criteria, circuits and analysis code were deposited here before any quantum hardware was used. What is tested, and what is not Tested: whether the return probability stays above the ergodic baseline 1/16 at depths 8–23, and whether that excess is larger for the time-reversal-symmetric class by the ratio exact numerics predict for these fixed instances. Not tested: the withdrawn temporal-memory claims of 10.5281/zenodo.20470129. The birthmark is closed-system coherent memory, which measurement and reset erase, so no outcome here bears on those claims. Not tested: the universal random-matrix value 1.889. At this size (N = 16) the circuit family itself gives about 1.66, so a finite-size difference is expected. Not a quantum-advantage claim: a 16-dimensional system is exactly simulable. This is a hardware-validation experiment. Design Hardware: ibm_kingston, physical qubits 108–109–118–129 as an open chain, selected by a no-QPU calibration audit (included as v6_backend_audit.zip). Circuits: a kicked-Ising Floquet period Kx(a/2) → D(h1) → Kx(b) → D(h2) → Kx(a/2), with D(h) = exp(−iΣhiZi)·exp(−iπ/4 ΣZiZj), at exactly 6 CZ per period. COE (symmetric): h1 = h2. TRSB (broken): h1 = h + d, h2 = h − d. The classes differ only in virtual-Z angles. Instances: 16 seeded COE/TRSB pairs (seed 20261013), run at every depth from 8 to 23 (48–138 CZ). Observable: P(t) = |⟨0000|Ft|0000⟩|². The primary statistic is the readout-mitigated excess ratio R = ECOE / ETRSB, where E is the mean of P(t) − 1/16. A noise fidelity common to both classes cancels in R. Controls: 32 deep circuits (depths 60–63) as a decoherence-floor check. 8 state-preparation monitors. 16 readout-calibration circuits. Run: one SamplerV2 job of 568 circuits at 256 shots each, with dynamical decoupling and twirling off and the execution order shuffled. Predictions Quantity COE TRSB R Excess over 1/16, depths 8–23 (noiseless, primary) 0.0896 0.0537 1.667 Same instances, infinite-time limit 0.0952 0.0634 1.502 Circuit family, 10,000 random draws — — 1.661 Random-matrix reference, N = 16 — — 1.889 Under four simulated noise models (nominal, pessimistic, and each with coherent errors), the mitigated R stays between 1.64 and 1.77. The shot-noise standard deviation of R at 256 shots is 0.070–0.125. Pre-registered decision criteria Test Pass condition H1 (primary): symmetry dependence 99% CI lower bound of R > 1.0 H2 (primary): quantitative agreement 99% CI of R intersects 1.54–1.87 and is at most 1.0 wide S1: birthmark above decohered floor Window excess minus depth 60–63 excess, 99% CI lower bound > 0, for both classes S2: matched fidelity between classes 0.85 ≤ FCOE/FTRSB ≤ 1.15 S3: instance-level agreement Pearson r ≥ 0.80 against exact predictions S4 (flag only): state prep and drift Monitors ≥ 0.95, drift ≤ 0.045 Overall verdict: CONFIRMED if H1, H2 and S2 all pass; PARTIAL if H1 passes but H2 or S2 fails; NOT CONFIRMED if H1 fails. Every test is reported whatever the outcome. Uncertainty comes from a 10,000-sample parametric multinomial bootstrap over every circuit's counts, with instances held fixed. Amendment 1 (v1.1.0, made before any data) Amendment 1 changed two things relative to v1.0.0 (10.5281/zenodo.23355804): Shots: reduced from 1024 to 256 per circuit for QPU budget, cutting estimated execution from about 152 s to about 38 s. H2: changed from "point estimate in 1.54–1.87" to the CI rule above, because at 256 shots the point rule would falsely fail 20–25% of the time under the pessimistic models. A CI-width cap of 1.0 keeps H2 informative. Circuits, instances and predictions are unchanged. The trade-off is that H2 is now a weaker test. Provenance Every reported number is derived by script from raw counts: Source and transpiled circuits are saved as QPY. Before submission, every transpiled circuit is mapped back to 4 qubits and its unitary checked against the exact model to < 10−8. The analysis reads its decision bands only from predictions.json and its data only from the raw results file. Submission is gated on the DOI of this record. Files: The PDF is the authoritative pre-registration. predictions.json holds every predicted number and decision band. birthmark_prereg_v1.1.0.zip contains the circuit builder, verification, submission and frozen analysis scripts, plus simulated-data self-tests. v6_backend_audit.zip is the pre-submission calibration audit. Known limitations Small system size (N = 16), so the random-matrix value is not expected. The prediction is specific to depths 8–23 and to these 16 fixed instances. The noise models exclude leakage, TLS fluctuations and crosstalk from outside the chain. T1 relaxation biases P(0000) upward, which pulls R toward 1 (conservative). One backend, one path, one job: no replication. Data: CC BY 4.0. Code: MIT. Principal investigator: Amit Brahmbhatt, Quantum-Clarity LLC.
On the IBM Heron processor ibm_fez, 144 qubits form 36 domains of four. A field law running on a microcontroller (an ESP32-S3, firmware v4.12) turns the measured populations of every cycle into the rotation angles of the next, and a Hebbian coupling matrix of two images, a unicorn and a heart, makes the two images attractors of the collective: cued with part of either, the field completes it. The experiment writes a blend of the two: of the 16 pixels on which the images differ, k are taken from the unicorn and the rest from the heart (which pixels: fixed in the registration, per trial), the 20 shared pixels as they are. The blend is held for two cycles and released, and the field runs six free cycles on its own. Resolution is the first free cycle in which the field's majority picture agrees with one image on at least 90 percent of the pixels. Lines, thresholds and rules were fixed and hashed before the first registered job (registration SHA-256 81398e6660c6538ebcf1566b3a2ebb6ecbaaefe29da074894848516b5749acda; a first registration was refused by its own budget guard after four burn jobs and is part of the deposit). Results, as they fell: of 13 field-on trials 11 resolved into one of the two images; the fraction resolved to the unicorn was 0.00, 0.00, 0.33, 0.50, 1.00, 1.00 for k = 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, a monotone curve with a single flip whose interpolated crossing lies at k* = 9.0; the censored decision time was 4.4 cycles at the two levels nearest the flip against 1.0 at the levels far from it; the two field-off controls, the same blend with the inter-domain coupling off, never resolved. The device's lean, read from the cycles in which the field was off, pointed to the heart and moved the fair point up by about one pixel, as the registered exploratory line asked. All five binding lines and the exploratory line held. The decision dynamics is the one a textbook predicts, a mean-field quench of 16 domains from the blend's magnetisation; the content of the experiment is that it runs, pre-registered to the pixel, on a quantum collective with the controller in the loop. Two chips were in the loop: the controller (ESP32-S3, with the field, the coupling matrix and the agents drawn on its display during the run) and a witness (ESP32-C3) running the byte-identical kernel source, compiled with the same arctangent and without fused multiply-add, so that the RISC-V chip in software arithmetic and the Xtensa chip with its floating-point unit produce the same bits: a seeded programme of 527 exchanges over every kernel path gave the same vector on both before the run, and on every one of the 148 ticks of the run the witness returned the same bytes as the controller. 148 jobs of 2048 shots, one device, one night. The deposit holds the registration (and the refused first registration with its burn log), the model and registration script, the runner, the verdict script, the kernel replica, the rehearsal on the noiseless simulator with both chips in the loop under the hashed registration, the run log with the measured populations of every qubit in every cycle and the witness flag of every tick, the job ids, the verdict (formed once), the bit-check vectors of the two chips, the write-up (buridan_paper_v1.pdf) and the scripts and figures that build it. The firmware sources and binaries are not deposited; their SHA-256 are in the registration.