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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I actually created a template to make research dossiers to do exactly that on GitHub. it works, and self hosts, and has a DOI, and blockchain timestamps... I'm a quantum physicist that left academia cause it was too slow for my taste, and I think the technology is here now for open-sourcing science research.