Intelligent Fault Tolerance
Parham Ghayour
Abstract
Abstract An intelligent quantum error-correction system should improve recovery using information available during computation, but syndrome observations do not necessarily identify the physical mechanism producing them. We analyze this tension through a precisely specified, reproducible model of a genuine [[7,1,3]] Steane CSS code subjected to hidden, temporally persistent, correlated Pauli noise. The simulation exhaustively enumerates all 47 = 16,384 physical Pauli patterns and the 64 syndrome classes. A causal hidden-Markov filter uses only the observed syndrome history to update a posterior over two correlated-error environments; a logical-class maximum-a-posteriori decision then conditions on this posterior. A learned logistic temporal model provides a separate data-driven comparator. On 220,000 locked, sequentially correlated instances, the stationary noise-aware decoder fails in 2.7923% of cases versus 2.5218% for the hidden-Markov decoder, an observed relative reduction of 9.69%. A moving-block bootstrap yields a paired absolute difference of 0.2705 percentage points (approximate 95% interval [0.2354,0.3064] points). A state-oracle decoder achieves 1.9809%; deliberate model misspecification increases the hidden-Markov failure rate to 2.8809%. We derive an information theoretic bound on the value of history, prove a decoder-regret bound controlled by posterior-state error, and give an explicit syndrome-aliasing construction on the same code: two physically different fault channels induce identical entire syndrome-history laws while requiring incompatible recoveries, forcing a strictly positive failure probability for every syndrome-only controller. These mathematical facts arise from established Bayesian decision and indistinguishability principles; we make no claim to a new fault-tolerance theorem. This is an original, small-code model study, not a circuit-level, real-time, scaling, or hardware result. It identifies both an opportunity and a non-removable information limit for intelligent QEC.