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

https://www.theregister.com/research/2026/06/24/boffin-claims-microsofts-supposed-quantum-leap-does-not-compute-due-to-basic-python-errors/5260489

by connorboyle • 28 days ago

186 56 28 days ago

theregister.com

gadders• 28 days ago

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

Anthony-G• 28 days ago

As soon as I saw this word, I guessed that El Reg was the source.

dnautics• 28 days ago

im surprised it's still around. i remember reading it in the late 90s.

mac3n• 28 days ago

Guess it went pear-shaped!

Majorana particles, subatomic particles that scientists have not observed directly.

i expect they're looking for Majorana quasiparticles

happytoexplain• 28 days ago

I was surprised to see it - I thought "boffin" was good-natured but highly irreverent, like "nerd". But I can't imagine any publication writing the headline, "Computer nerd claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute."

SAI_Peregrinus• 28 days ago

The Register is highly irreverent, as a rule.

cpncrunch• 28 days ago

It's typical of the Register. They always use the word "boffin" for expert/scientist. It's a british word used to describe a clever person.

wiml• 28 days ago

"Good natured but highly irreverent" is pretty much The Register's house style.

gh02t• 28 days ago

To be fair, "boffin" usually implies someone has relevant (usually scientific) expertise, but nerd doesn't. Henry Legg has the relevant credentials to give weight to his claims, he's not just some random basement nerd.

sensanaty• 28 days ago

Completely unrelated but I'm always sad that Umbra, Penumbra and Equinox aren't used very often in day-to-day speech, very cool sounding words.

devin• 28 days ago

Also, adumbrate.

mellosouls• 28 days ago

TheRegister - like, say Viz - likes its lazy, outdated journalistic stereotypes and tropes.

That's not being critical of them; its their humour, they mimic the crassness and condescension of tabloid journalism, particularly that of the 70s and 80s (even tabloids have moved on).

When you see cliches like boffin, nanny state, egghead etc etc in a HN title, you can be reasonably confident its El Reg.

frollogaston6• 28 days ago

Was pleasantly surprised to see the exact bug in here, in a "The Register" article of all places. Legg showed that fixing the bug invalidates the research. Seems Microsoft is responding to a clear problem with a vague dismissal.

Edit: Oh, The Register is a true tech paper, guess the name makes sense for that. Got mixed up cause there are a bunch of general papers called something Register.

dekhn• 28 days ago

The Register is a tech paper that is modelled on various British tabloids (daily mail, the sun). Sometimes it's humor, sometimes it's real news and occasionally they even break a new story.

frollogaston6• 28 days ago

Haha, they got me. Was mostly thinking "The Daily Register" which doesn't exist, but Daily Mail does.

rtkwe• 28 days ago

I always find it hard to remember which of the British publications are real and which are pure trash. Usually they reveal it pretty quickly with the writing though.

secretsatan• 28 days ago

I wouldn’t say it was modeled on that trash, rather they poke fun at them, eg, the term boffin is obviously used tongue in cheeck

swiftcoder• 28 days ago

Yeah, it's always weird that they write and format the articles like the absolute worst tier of new sites, and then the articles themselves are oftenn very technical

pseudohadamard• 28 days ago

Even without this, the whole thing was snake oil from the start, and this was pointed out by a number of researchers at the time. If you need to invent a new form of physics to make your claims work then there's something very fishy going on.

smartformulapro• 28 days ago

[flagged]

frollogaston6• 28 days ago

I don't think research papers normally come with a simple portable way for others to rerun the calculations. At some point the code is complicated enough to be impossible to just proofread without running it.

brumbelow• 28 days ago

Yeah I would say that the 'some point' is frontier quantum research. Which makes it even more confusing as to how something like this is not caught.

TaupeRanger• 28 days ago

Pretty sure you responded to an AI bot, looking at their comment history.

jMyles• 28 days ago

I don't think research papers normally come with a simple portable way for others to rerun the calculations.

...which, for situations where a readable/narrated test suite is entirely possible, is awful.

m4gr4th342• 28 days ago

I actually have been fiddling with something like this. Self publishing on GitHub, numbers that are run in real time. If code can be open-sourced, I think research can start to be. I started using linux in 2019, and honestly, though I don't use it now (windows-turned-mac man, sigh), open source is a solid concept.

CodesInChaos• 28 days ago

I'm surprised they even included source code at all.

tomhow• 28 days ago

We've banned this account for posting many comments that seem generated. Please don't do this. HN is for conversation between humans. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rdtsc• 28 days ago

boffins willing to go on the record as describing Microsoft's work as "unreliable" and perhaps even "fraudulent."
Microsoft insisted its work is sound and in early June 2026 announced Majorana 2, a "next-generation topological quantum chip" it developed with the help of its own agentic AI.

AI hallucinates quantum computing bullshit as well or better than humans can hallucinate quantum computing bullshit. Couldn't have a better combination of technologies helping each other out.

frollogaston6• 28 days ago

The kinds of bugs really look like human mistakes more than AI

mjhay• 28 days ago

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

rvba• 28 days ago

Looks that the next step of this "project" is selecting a patsy and blaming all on that one sacrificial person

josefritzishere• 28 days ago

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

teshier-A• 28 days ago

Unless if you list AI as a co-author, people are still responsible for the code they ship. Whatever tool was used to write said code

nhinck2• 28 days ago

Hopefully its "even if"

jdw64• 28 days ago

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-quantum-tgp

```

return xr.apply_ufunc(

    lambda x: (x - x[::-1]) / 2,

    conductance,

    input_core_dims=[dims],

    output_core_dims=[dims],

    vectorize=True,

) ```

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

simonw• 28 days ago

On Hacker News you can indent code samples with two spaces, like this:

  return xr.apply_ufunc(
      lambda x: (x - x[::-1]) / 2,
      conductance,
      input_core_dims=[dims],
      output_core_dims=[dims],
      vectorize=True,
  )

Isamu• 28 days ago

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

antonvs• 28 days ago

Came here to say the same thing.

Sadly, noticing this doesn’t make us boffins.

deflator• 28 days ago

I think boffin is a Britishism. I have heard it other places, not just on El Reg. Specifically: a lot on Top Gear when it was hosted by Clarkson.

womble2• 28 days ago

It is British, but actually using it dates you as still being stuck in the 90s (at the latest)

ck2• 28 days ago

Majorana fermion and Ettore Majorana are fascinating

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_fermion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana

dmvjs• 28 days ago

i assumed Boffin was their last name

bdavbdav• 28 days ago

Not heard "Boffin" used in years.

frankohn• 28 days ago

I guess Microsoft upper management doesn't understand anything at all about quantum computing and they are "scammed" by Microsoft research people in quantum computing telling them they are making breakthroughts, that in a few years that can become a real thing, etc. They just need to publish some impressive sounding papers a little bit once in a while and the thing keeps rolling.

May be it is just me but when I see all these quantum computing pseudo results I wonder how people can believe this thing has any hope to work at all so much it is ungrounded to reality.

All in all, the whole fundation of the quantum treatment is flawed in my humble opinion because of the idea of wave-packet collapse, when a measurement is done, is by itself completely unsound. However they assume it holds perfectly and base a ton on speculative calculations assuming that principle holds perfectly which is far from true.

Successful engineering and technology development is not done having a crazy idea that holds only based on a number of highly incertain assumptions but it needs solid ideas developed incrementally iterating from things we already know. First electricity, then basic electronics, the diode, then bipolar transistors, then J-FET, then MOSFET and so on.

nyeah• 28 days ago

the idea of wave-packet collapse, when a measurement is done, is by itself completely unsound.

It sounds crazy if you read about the math first. Which almost everyone does ... now. But in the lab, if you set up a detector array that reports individual discrete particles arriving one at a time, that is exactly what you see. You just see random arrival times. You don't see a smooth wavefunction that then collapses.

The problem was never to start with the math and try to understand what's happening to a "wavefunction" or how the heck it could possibly "collapse." Instead they started with the crazy experimental results and made math that seems to always fit so far.

lukan• 28 days ago

The crazy thing to me is that QC is often treated as a normal thing that will come soon, but all we have so far are some crazy experiments we barely understand and some other crazy ideas to maybe build a useful application for calculation with that.

So I applaud all QC researchers and wish them luck. But I start paying really attention once something actually works.

As far as I understand, this is not even like Fusion. Where we knew the basic concept can work 70 years(?) ago, but still fail to build a workable power plant today, because it is just incredibly hard. And we don't know if we ever can make it work economical. But with quantum computers we don't even know whether it can work for practical applications besides quantum research at all - at least this is my understanding.

blastonico• 28 days ago

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

2OEH8eoCRo0• 28 days ago

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

rav• 28 days ago

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

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

Related Stories