harnessing quantum

A one-week hackathon for ~70 participants on simulation methods for computational physics. Each track lead ships a harness inside QuantumBFS/quantum.harness — a GitHub repository for employing AI agents to do research — and your group forks it, attacks the open challenge, and submits a pull request back. On the closing morning, the eight selected groups present, and the advisors back the results they are willing to "buy" with Mac mini awards.

Registration Closed Read the Guide See Program

// 01 — How It Works

01 Pick a track Choose a method — Exact Diagonalization, MPS/LTRG/DMRG/TEBD, PEPS/CTMRG, QMC, Quantum Circuit Simulation, Semidefinite Programming, or AI agent and knowledge-base infrastructure. The track lead's basic harness gets you onboarded. See the guide.
02 Onboard via the harness Run /beginner-training. Follow the guided tracks: check your setup, reproduce the reference result, read the key paper, and understand the challenge problem.
03 Register with a draft PR Team up (1–3) and run /take-challenge before 15:00 on Day 1. It opens one draft registration PR. Push all your work to that same PR, then run /challenge-report and gh pr ready by Thursday 20:00 to submit it for review.
04 Demo & advisor review Advisors review the PRs online on Thursday evening, track by track, and pick 8 groups. Those groups present on the main stage on Friday morning; the advisor panel then awards 4 Mac minis, plus 1 for the best sharing session. Selected groups polish their skills for merge and share their challenge history for research analysis.

// 02 — Challenges

Each track carries open challenge problems — well-posed questions that go beyond a reference paper and may lead to a research output. Pick one for your group, or shape your own with your agent. Browse the challenges.

// 03 — Important Dates

Milestone	Date
Application deadline	Closed after July 1, 2026
Final list confirmed	July 8, 2026
Check-in	July 26, 2026
Hackathon week	July 27 – 31, 2026 (Mon – Fri)

// 04 — Communication

We use Zulip: harnessing-quantum.zulipchat.com. Selected participants receive an invite with their acceptance email; this is where announcements, help-desk Q&A, and per-track threads live.

// 05 — Host & Organizers

Organizers:

You-Jin Deng — University of Science and Technology of China
Kun Chen — Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Jin-Guo Liu — Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
Chao Zhang — Anhui Normal University
Lei Wang — Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Host unit: Institute of Mathematics and Fundamental Physics, Hefei National Laboratory.

Venue: Room C102, Hefei National Laboratory, 5099 Wangjiang West Road, Shushan District, Hefei, Anhui.

Contact: office@imfp.org.cn

// 06 — Sponsors

Awards — the five Mac mini (M4) awards are sponsored by Sugon 中科曙光.
Compute — cluster resources for the week are provided by SCNet 超算互联网, China’s national supercomputing platform.