The Frozen Token Reaches Quantum: a complete, pre-registered map of a deterministic single-token encoder's monitoring laws on a real quantum processor — fingerprint, privacy, integrity, qubit health, drift, and a molecular-state twin
The Frozen Token Reaches Quantum: a complete, pre-registered map of a deterministic single-token encoder's monitoring laws on a real quantum processor — fingerprint, privacy, integrity, qubit health, drift, and a molecular-state twin Randolph James Ferlic, M.D. and Kimberly Kate Ferlic — Fieldstone Analytics, LLC, Austin, TX, USA Preprint · Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23670079 · CC-BY 4.0 · Community: spiral-domain-encoder-campaign · This record characterizes previously filed and published methods applied to a new signal source (a quantum processor's measurement outputs) and discloses no new patentable subject matter; the one candidate new application (client-side quantum-job attestation) was deliberately not pursued as intellectual property — see the notice below. Abstract A frozen, deterministic single-token encoder reduces a window of inputs, by a fixed computation, to one 8-bit token and a bounded ≤256-cell lookup, with the nearest-centroid distance serving as a label-free novelty score. A prior program established, across many classical sensing modalities, a predictive theory of this encoder — a competence-zone separability law, a per-entity self-twin law, a compose-versus-recommission law, a cost-not-accuracy law, a deployment-sizing law, a privacy-inversion bound, a safety-interlock characterization, and a geometry-gated drift-adaptation capability. This record asks whether those laws extend to a new kind of entity: a real cloud quantum processor, probed only through the data a present-day gate-model machine returns — measurement counts (single-shot in-phase/quadrature readout is no longer exposed). Established by a pre-registration with frozen falsifiable bands and a simulate-then-validate-on-hardware discipline, the answer is that the monitoring laws reach a quantum processor essentially in full, from counts alone, with no new algorithm. A frozen 1-byte token fingerprints which of three IBM Heron-r2 156-qubit backends ran a job (balanced accuracy 1.00; chance 0.333), proves the signature stable rather than shot-noise (same-device test-retest 0.65 ≪ 1.00), exposes a privacy-inversion (device re-identification 1.00 under an abstracted backend), acts as a result-integrity dead-switch (wrong-device 1.00; gross tamper ≥1σ 0.98–1.00, including a real circuit-level tamper at 1.00 with the novelty spiking ~95× and no cheap null-space evasion; honest subtle-tamper blind spot 0.51), recovers a device's qubit-level calibration ranking from a four-second probe (Spearman 0.88; eight of ten worst qubits; generalizing to a second device at 0.86), and builds a molecular-state twin (H₂ on real hardware: bond-distortion Spearman 1.00; energy ordering 0.771; distortion-twin robust across a finer 12-geometry ladder and two Heron devices, 0.96–0.99). The keystone laws transfer: the separability screen forecasts reach when matched to the monitor's geometry (matched 1.00; generic 0.69, a characterized blind spot); cost-not-accuracy holds (byte = 200-tree forest, Δ0.00); sizing holds (≈4 commissioning sub-batches for fingerprinting, ≈8 for integrity); compose-versus-recommission holds exactly and closes a clean division of labor with the drift law. A hybrid classical→quantum→LLM pipeline monitor localizes which stage faulted at 100% for three bytes. Temporal drift (QF-2) is positive and tracks the device's calibration state rather than the clock — over seven snapshots across nine days the token's label-free novelty tracks IBM's own reported readout error at Spearman +0.89, more tightly than elapsed time (+0.68), because the device recalibrates ~daily so calibration drift is recal-cyclic (the novelty climbs and then falls back as the device is recalibrated, and the token follows it up and back down) and it tracks readout-layer drift specifically, not gate drift (+0.64), C10 reaching the quantum service-life axis, honestly scoped as a bounded n=7 result. Honest negatives are reported with equal weight (no untrained quantum-feature-map advantage, no label-derivative "synergy," no cheap two-qubit-gate-error readout). The transferable lesson: the cheapest possible deterministic monitor — one frozen byte — reaches the most advanced computing hardware we have, as a fingerprint, a privacy probe, an integrity dead-switch, and a health and drift gauge, from the measurement counts the machine already returns, without a new algorithm or a gradient. Highlights · The monitoring laws reach a real quantum processor from measurement counts alone — no new algorithm. A frozen 1-byte token fingerprints which of three IBM Heron-r2 backends ran a job (1.00; chance 0.333) and the test-retest control (same device 0.65 ≪ cross-device 1.00) proves it is a stable device signature, not shot noise. · A privacy inversion on cloud quantum. An "anonymized" backend is re-identifiable from job counts (QF-4, re-identification 1.00) — extending the program's confidentiality-is-not-anonymity bound to a quantum processor; dual-use (user-side audit / provider side-channel). · A result-integrity dead-switch with a declared blind spot. From counts, label-free: trips on a wrong/substituted device (1.00) and on gross result tampering (≥1σ, 0.98–1.00, clean dose-response) — including a real circuit-level tamper (an X-flip of half the register before measurement) at 1.00 with the novelty spiking ~95×, with no cheap null-space evasion (an adaptive quiet-direction override is caught immediately, 1.00) and no false trip on a genuine same-device re-run (0.50) — and honestly fails on subtle device-consistent (on-manifold) tampering (0.51) — defense-in-depth, not a cryptographic verifier. · Qubit-level health from a four-second probe. The token recovers the vendor's own readout-error calibration ranking (Spearman 0.88, 156 qubits) and flags eight of its ten worst qubits — a cheap, fresh, label-free health map that generalizes to a second Heron device (Spearman 0.86 at matched shots). · A molecular-state digital twin on real hardware. Commissioned on H₂'s equilibrium geometry, the token's label-free novelty tracks bond distortion (Spearman 1.00) and preserves the dissociation-energy ordering (0.771), on the device's noisy prepared state — the filed self-twin on a quantum-chemistry target; the distortion-twin is robust across a finer 12-geometry ladder and two Heron devices (0.96–0.99), its finer energy recovery shot-limited rather than device-limited. · The keystone laws transfer. The separability screen forecasts monitor reach iff matched to the monitor's geometry (matched 1.00; a generic two-class screen 0.69, blind to additive tamper); cost-not-accuracy holds (byte equals a 200-tree forest, Δ0.00); sizing holds (≈4/≈8 commissioning sub-batches); and compose-versus-recommission holds exactly — a device-A monitor flags a healthy device B at 100% and must be recommissioned, closing a clean division of labor with the drift law (small within-device drift is the drift law's regime; large cross-device shift is recommission's). · A three-byte hybrid-pipeline monitor. An array of 1-byte self-twins localizes which stage of a classical→quantum→LLM pipeline faulted at 100%, provided each stage is probed with the matched geometry (workload self-twin for covariate faults; a fixed reference probe for the quantum stage). · Honest negatives, and no new intellectual property. An untrained quantum feature-map carries no classical-data advantage, stacking label-derivative codebooks yields no super-additive "synergy," and a cheap echo probe cannot rank small two-qubit gate errors from counts. Every result is the filed, published self-twin applied to a new signal source; the one candidate new application (client-side quantum-job attestation) was weighed as intellectual property and deliberately not pursued, the chosen protection being this publication. · Trust in a cloud the user cannot see, at near-zero cost. The self-twin triad answers the practical cloud-quantum questions — did my job run on the device I was allocated (QF-1), is the abstracted backend unlinkable (QF-4; no), was my result substituted or grossly corrupted (QF-5), which qubits were healthy at run time (QF-6) — from the measurement histogram the user already receives, with no provider cooperation, trusted server, or extra circuits. The provider-side alternatives (randomized benchmarking, tomography, cryptographic verification) spend many designed circuits, privileged access, or interaction; this is the "read the receipt you already have" layer, and it is defense-in-depth beneath verification, not a replacement for it. · One primitive, more than twenty orders of magnitude. The identical mechanism now monitors a vibrating bearing, an electrocardiogram, a radio emitter, an industrial audio machine, and the measurement readout of a 156-qubit superconducting processor — a single cheap, deterministic, auditable primitive reaching the exotic end of the computing-substrate spectrum, the strongest evidence yet for the program's cost-not-accuracy premise (see the breadth figure). · Temporal drift (QF-2) is positive and vendor-corroborated — the token tracks the device's calibration *state*, not the clock. Over seven snapshots across nine days and six recalibration cycles, the token's label-free novelty tracks IBM's own historical reported readout error at Spearman +0.89 — more tightly than elapsed time (+0.68) — and the two-qubit gate error at only +0.64. Because the device recalibrates ~daily, calibration drift is recal-cyclic (the novelty rises, then is recalibrated back toward baseline), and the token follows the calibration state up and back down: the two late snapshots have low novelty and low reported readout error even though their gate error is the worst of the series. C10 on the quantum service-life axis, honestly bounded at n=7. The transferable lesson A single, auditable, sub-milliwatt monitoring primitive — one frozen deterministic byte — now d
The Frozen Token Reaches Quantum: a complete, pre-registered map of a deterministic single-token encoder's monitoring laws on a real quantum processor — fingerprint, privacy, integrity, qubit health, drift, and a molecular-state twin Randolph James Ferlic, M.D. and Kimberly Kate Ferlic — Fieldstone Analytics, LLC, Austin, TX, USA Preprint · Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23670079 · CC-BY 4.0 · Community: spiral-domain-encoder-campaign · This record characterizes previously filed and published methods applied to a new signal source (a quantum processor's measurement outputs) and discloses no new patentable subject matter; the one candidate new application (client-side quantum-job attestation) was deliberately not pursued as intellectual property — see the notice below. Abstract A frozen, deterministic single-token encoder reduces a window of inputs, by a fixed computation, to one 8-bit token and a bounded ≤256-cell lookup, with the nearest-centroid distance serving as a label-free novelty score. A prior program established, across many classical sensing modalities, a predictive theory of this encoder — a competence-zone separability law, a per-entity self-twin law, a compose-versus-recommission law, a cost-not-accuracy law, a deployment-sizing law, a privacy-inversion bound, a safety-interlock characterization, and a geometry-gated drift-adaptation capability. This record asks whether those laws extend to a new kind of entity: a real cloud quantum processor, probed only through the data a present-day gate-model machine returns — measurement counts (single-shot in-phase/quadrature readout is no longer exposed). Established by a pre-registration with frozen falsifiable bands and a simulate-then-validate-on-hardware discipline, the answer is that the monitoring laws reach a quantum processor essentially in full, from counts alone, with no new algorithm. A frozen 1-byte token fingerprints which of three IBM Heron-r2 156-qubit backends ran a job (balanced accuracy 1.00; chance 0.333), proves the signature stable rather than shot-noise (same-device test-retest 0.65 ≪ 1.00), exposes a privacy-inversion (device re-identification 1.00 under an abstracted backend), acts as a result-integrity dead-switch (wrong-device 1.00; gross tamper ≥1σ 0.98–1.00, including a real circuit-level tamper at 1.00 with the novelty spiking ~95× and no cheap null-space evasion; honest subtle-tamper blind spot 0.51), recovers a device's qubit-level calibration ranking from a four-second probe (Spearman 0.88; eight of ten worst qubits; generalizing to a second device at 0.86), and builds a molecular-state twin (H₂ on real hardware: bond-distortion Spearman 1.00; energy ordering 0.771; distortion-twin robust across a finer 12-geometry ladder and two Heron devices, 0.96–0.99). The keystone laws transfer: the separability screen forecasts reach when matched to the monitor's geometry (matched 1.00; generic 0.69, a characterized blind spot); cost-not-accuracy holds (byte = 200-tree forest, Δ0.00); sizing holds (≈4 commissioning sub-batches for fingerprinting, ≈8 for integrity); compose-versus-recommission holds exactly and closes a clean division of labor with the drift law. A hybrid classical→quantum→LLM pipeline monitor localizes which stage faulted at 100% for three bytes. Temporal drift (QF-2) is positive and tracks the device's calibration state rather than the clock — over seven snapshots across nine days the token's label-free novelty tracks IBM's own reported readout error at Spearman +0.89, more tightly than elapsed time (+0.68), because the device recalibrates ~daily so calibration drift is recal-cyclic (the novelty climbs and then falls back as the device is recalibrated, and the token follows it up and back down) and it tracks readout-layer drift specifically, not gate drift (+0.64), C10 reaching the quantum service-life axis, honestly scoped as a bounded n=7 result. Honest negatives are reported with equal weight (no untrained quantum-feature-map advantage, no label-derivative "synergy," no cheap two-qubit-gate-error readout). The transferable lesson: the cheapest possible deterministic monitor — one frozen byte — reaches the most advanced computing hardware we have, as a fingerprint, a privacy probe, an integrity dead-switch, and a health and drift gauge, from the measurement counts the machine already returns, without a new algorithm or a gradient. Highlights · The monitoring laws reach a real quantum processor from measurement counts alone — no new algorithm. A frozen 1-byte token fingerprints which of three IBM Heron-r2 backends ran a job (1.00; chance 0.333) and the test-retest control (same device 0.65 ≪ cross-device 1.00) proves it is a stable device signature, not shot noise. · A privacy inversion on cloud quantum. An "anonymized" backend is re-identifiable from job counts (QF-4, re-identification 1.00) — extending the program's confidentiality-is-not-anonymity bound to a quantum processor; dual-use (user-side audit / provider side-channel). · A result-integrity dead-switch with a declared blind spot. From counts, label-free: trips on a wrong/substituted device (1.00) and on gross result tampering (≥1σ, 0.98–1.00, clean dose-response) — including a real circuit-level tamper (an X-flip of half the register before measurement) at 1.00 with the novelty spiking ~95×, with no cheap null-space evasion (an adaptive quiet-direction override is caught immediately, 1.00) and no false trip on a genuine same-device re-run (0.50) — and honestly fails on subtle device-consistent (on-manifold) tampering (0.51) — defense-in-depth, not a cryptographic verifier. · Qubit-level health from a four-second probe. The token recovers the vendor's own readout-error calibration ranking (Spearman 0.88, 156 qubits) and flags eight of its ten worst qubits — a cheap, fresh, label-free health map that generalizes to a second Heron device (Spearman 0.86 at matched shots). · A molecular-state digital twin on real hardware. Commissioned on H₂'s equilibrium geometry, the token's label-free novelty tracks bond distortion (Spearman 1.00) and preserves the dissociation-energy ordering (0.771), on the device's noisy prepared state — the filed self-twin on a quantum-chemistry target; the distortion-twin is robust across a finer 12-geometry ladder and two Heron devices (0.96–0.99), its finer energy recovery shot-limited rather than device-limited. · The keystone laws transfer. The separability screen forecasts monitor reach iff matched to the monitor's geometry (matched 1.00; a generic two-class screen 0.69, blind to additive tamper); cost-not-accuracy holds (byte equals a 200-tree forest, Δ0.00); sizing holds (≈4/≈8 commissioning sub-batches); and compose-versus-recommission holds exactly — a device-A monitor flags a healthy device B at 100% and must be recommissioned, closing a clean division of labor with the drift law (small within-device drift is the drift law's regime; large cross-device shift is recommission's). · A three-byte hybrid-pipeline monitor. An array of 1-byte self-twins localizes which stage of a classical→quantum→LLM pipeline faulted at 100%, provided each stage is probed with the matched geometry (workload self-twin for covariate faults; a fixed reference probe for the quantum stage). · Honest negatives, and no new intellectual property. An untrained quantum feature-map carries no classical-data advantage, stacking label-derivative codebooks yields no super-additive "synergy," and a cheap echo probe cannot rank small two-qubit gate errors from counts. Every result is the filed, published self-twin applied to a new signal source; the one candidate new application (client-side quantum-job attestation) was weighed as intellectual property and deliberately not pursued, the chosen protection being this publication. · Trust in a cloud the user cannot see, at near-zero cost. The self-twin triad answers the practical cloud-quantum questions — did my job run on the device I was allocated (QF-1), is the abstracted backend unlinkable (QF-4; no), was my result substituted or grossly corrupted (QF-5), which qubits were healthy at run time (QF-6) — from the measurement histogram the user already receives, with no provider cooperation, trusted server, or extra circuits. The provider-side alternatives (randomized benchmarking, tomography, cryptographic verification) spend many designed circuits, privileged access, or interaction; this is the "read the receipt you already have" layer, and it is defense-in-depth beneath verification, not a replacement for it. · One primitive, more than twenty orders of magnitude. The identical mechanism now monitors a vibrating bearing, an electrocardiogram, a radio emitter, an industrial audio machine, and the measurement readout of a 156-qubit superconducting processor — a single cheap, deterministic, auditable primitive reaching the exotic end of the computing-substrate spectrum, the strongest evidence yet for the program's cost-not-accuracy premise (see the breadth figure). · Temporal drift (QF-2) is positive and vendor-corroborated — the token tracks the device's calibration state, not the clock. Over seven snapshots across nine days and six recalibration cycles, the token's label-free novelty tracks IBM's own historical reported readout error at Spearman +0.89 — more tightly than elapsed time (+0.68) — and the two-qubit gate error at only +0.64. Because the device recalibrates ~daily, calibration drift is recal-cyclic (the novelty rises, then is recalibrated back toward baseline), and the token follows the calibration state up and back down: the two late snapshots have low novelty and low reported readout error even though their gate error is the worst of the series. C10 on the quantum service-life axis, honestly bounded at n=7. The transferable lesson A single, auditable, sub-milliwatt monitoring primitive — one frozen deterministic byte — now d
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.
We report a set of pre-registered experiments on the three 156-qubit IBM Heron r2 processors reachable on a single open-plan account (ibm_kingston, ibm_marrakesh, ibm_fez), carried out on 14–15 October 2026. The object of study is not computational speedup but channel reliability: whether fixed symbolic messages can be delivered intact through a present-day noisy processor when the processor's per-wire readout response is measured fresh in the same sitting, and whether two such processors can exchange messages with per-position verification. Messages are 17-symbol sequences drawn from a 13-symbol test alphabet whose preparations collapse to nine distinguishable readout classes. A receiver combining per-wire selection from a fresh characterization, grammar-constrained decoding, and a corpus-frequency tie-break delivered 36/36 messages on ibm_kingston in two independent campaigns, 36/36 on ibm_marrakesh, and 35/36 on ibm_fez, against stale-plan and uncharacterized controls ranging from 2/36 to 30/36 depending on backend and control type. The grammar-constrained receiver without the corpus prior scored 30/36, 30/36, and 29/36 on the three backends; its losses are a single systematic mechanism — a deterministic tie on one battery message — identified from saved counts and closed by the prior. In a separate experiment, ibm_kingston and ibm_marrakesh exchanged self-introduction streams authored by each backend from its own fresh characterization, through a six-stage symmetric relay, with 204/204 position-flights received exactly and zero substitutions. In a counts-only blind test, an independent decoder with no shared codebook recovered the discreteness and grouping structure of two authored streams (pooled pairwise grouping agreement 0.971 against a pre-registered 0.90 strong-pass bar) while overestimating the alphabet size (reported 8, true value 6). A census of repeated characterizations shows that the ranking of a device's clearest wires turns over within hours (same-day top-17 wire overlap of 1–2 of 17 on ibm_marrakesh), while per-wire response quality moves by only ~0.01, so characterizations are within-sitting instruments. No speedup, no machine networking, and no machine understanding is claimed. The full receiver implementation is withheld as a trade secret; verification is offered through the published job IDs, retained raw counts, and tiered third-party reproduction.
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.
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
Quantum processors are now used as feature generators for classical models on tabular data. A circuit encodes each record, the device returns expectation values, and a classical model learns from them. A recent report claimed large gains from such features, gains that appeared only on noisy hardware. These claims are hard to check, because a quantum device is not a static function. Its state changes from job to job and from one calibration to the next, and that drift can leak information about the outcome into the features. We propose a five-step protocol for testing claims of this kind. It runs a circuit that carries no data in the same jobs as the real one. It checks whether the hardware leaves a recognizable mark on each job. It compares random and natural assignments of records to jobs, replays the null results under other submission orders, and closes the leak with a job-purged backtest. We apply it, pre-registered, to the HSBC and IBM study of fill probabilities in bond trading, which reported a large hardware-only gain. We use a public analog task and run the study's circuit on a 129-qubit chain of an IBM Heron processor. Under controlled assignment the hardware features give no gain over classical features, and the device reproduces the ideal features about as well as shot noise allows. Yet every job carries a distinct fingerprint. A circuit with no data at all predicts fills well above chance when records are batched by outcome and the same job sits on both sides of the train/test split. Removing that overlap removes the effect. The protocol costs under an hour of processor time and is designed for any hardware feature or kernel pipeline on tabular data.
Quantum computing and quantum sensing are routinely proposed as accelerants for fusion; a serious design program should test those proposals quantitatively rather than assume them. We deliver a resource-honest map of where the quantum toolbox helps a compact spherical-tokamak breeder and its tandem-mirror burner, and where it does not, formalised as three coupled estimation problems and computed on a single GPU-HPC campaign. On the machine-learning front we build a quantum-kernel transport surrogate and measure its classifier area-under-curve (AUC) falling with encoding width — 0.817 at four qubits to 0.691 at eight — the signature of exponential kernel concentration, for which we give the variance bound and the induced shot-cost scaling; at a realistic 37-logical-qubit problem the quantum Gram evaluation is 9–11 orders of magnitude slower than its classical counterpart. On the sensing front we derive the entanglement-advantage condition from the quantum Fisher information and specify the in-cryostat magnetometry chain for the breeder centrepost (peak field 16.84 T, kept formally distinct from the burner plug at 26.49 T): an NMR/EPR probe as the absolute monitor to ≤1 ppm, a SQUID and an NV-diamond ensemble (1 pT Hz^-1/2) for the 1 mT quench precursor, with the entanglement knee located at a normalised signal ≈0.14. Every Kronos in-bore diagnostic sits below the knee, where entanglement buys only +0.00077 AUC; above it (deep error-field mapping) a Heisenberg-limited protocol carries the standard-quantum-limit sensitivity from 5.7×10^-7 to 5.7×10^-8 T at 100 probes. On the fault-tolerant front we recompute the resource ledger from first formulas — the Grover iteration count 1.62^n and the surface-code footprint 2d^2 physical qubits per logical qubit — across 50 rows with zero discrepancy, and date the single fusion-relevant near-term niche: linear Vlasov kinetics at 11–19 logical qubits around 2029±2, with nonlinear five-dimensional gyrokinetics beyond 2035 and fleet-scale Grover search never practical (1.8×10^18 iterations). Three further workloads keep the verdict resource-honest: full six-dimensional kinetic Hamiltonian simulation at ~44 logical qubits and ~19 days, fault-tolerant phase estimation of the exact REBCO/alloy ground state at ~238 logical qubits and ~10^9 Toffoli gates, and a Harrow–Hassidim–Lloyd equilibrium linear solve at ~10^17 T-gates — all calibration-only. Two of the six quantum-track items are already twin-testable classically: a materials variational eigensolver reproduces a model ground state to 3.9×10^-6 Ha and reaches chemical accuracy on 3d alloy fragments with 4–14× shallower circuits than unitary coupled cluster (no advantage claimed), and a tensor-network kinetic solver compresses the distribution function with exponential rank convergence (2.2×10^-10 at bond rank 16, 0.19× storage). The honest bottom line is that nothing on the design critical path waits on quantum hardware — and establishing that, with the numbers behind it, is the result. Key results (frozen anchors): iter = 1.8 ×10^18; iter = 1.6 2^n. Methods & codes: CGYRO, GENE, QAOA, VQE, ADAPT-VQE. Live verification: 11 gate validator(s) with live-recompute cards (5 reproduced, 5 estimated, 1 revised). See the Verification section and data/verification.csv. Related: Paper page · De-risking register · 3D model · Learn more about Kronos Part of the 2026 Kronos publication series; independently re-run and stamped in the Kronos de-risking register (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22645689). All numerical values are frozen design-point anchors; see the register. Public research artifact. No proprietary, financial, or supply-chain information is included.