1. A different computer
- most AI problems don’t qualify
- CPU, GPU, QPU: different jobs
- for AI, the speedup is narrow: sampling
- three questions to ask first
- famous overpromises, dissected
- knowing when to walk away
2. Practical speedups
- the folklore, with fine print
- the trick: precision on averages
- how the square root actually happens
- a query-counting proof: classical can’t keep up
- Go flunks, bandits flunk
- so we invented a game of close calls
3. Ship it
- “assume the oracle exists,” says every paper
- we stop assuming and build it, gate by gate
- a game board made of qubits
- all the randomness, loaded up front
- picking moves without skewing the odds
- the scratch work starts piling up
4. Qubit care
- the finished circuit must run backward
- every cell updates at once, or bugs
- the self-flip trap
- snapshot the board, then swap
- one qubit holds the score
- the full bill, in qubits
5. Garbage collection
- there is no delete
- leftover junk stays tied to your answer
- and quietly poisons it
- forgetting means undoing history
- compute, use, uncompute
- clean scratch still doesn’t mean right answer
6. Peek and patch
- the rule every course teaches: never look
- production circuits look anyway
- measure the garbage on purpose
- patch the damage with phase fixes
- cheapest eraser there is
- machine-checked rules for when it’s safe
7. Other people’s memory
- scratch you can use but never inspect
- clean, borrowed, conditionally clean
- returning it as you found it isn’t enough
- promises checked where blocks meet
- Rust’s borrow checker, but for qubits
- mismatched promises, no deal
8. Show your work
- circuits that ace every test, wrongly
- hidden phases, invisible to truth tables
- checking everything costs 2^n
- escape hatch: one proof per circuit family
- every block ships with a seal, checked in milliseconds
- strangers’ code, safely composed
9. The impossible flipbook
- every page is a classical drawing
- the animation is impossible
- each step has a classical model; they refuse to glue
- one story per step, no story overall
- where the quantum actually lives
- and the gap has a price, in coherent memory
10. No bulk discount
- buying in bulk should get cheaper
- it doesn’t: qubits of memory, zero or linear, nothing between
- no amortizing, no compressing, no caching
- copy 1,000,000 costs what copy 1 cost
- a theorem, not a hunch
- why the flipbook can’t be fixed
11. Spot the fake
- a tabletop test for quantum claims
- no lab, no tomography
- fakers pay the qubit memory bill or fold
- any implementation, no peeking inside
- benchmarks that can’t be gamed
- pretenders fail exponentially fast
12. The next miracle
- the reigning faith of the AI era
- what the evidence says
- where quantum could fit in AI
- lesson 1’s questions, aimed at the headlines
- wall-clock math, not gut feel
- how to judge the next miracle