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, each advisor can back the student results they are willing to "buy" with Mac mini awards.

Apply Read the Guide See Program

// 01 — How It Works

01 Pick a track Choose a method — Exact Diagonalization, MPS, PEPS, QMC, VMC/NQS, Quantum Circuit Simulation, or propose your own. The track lead's basic harness gets you onboarded. See the guide.
02 Onboard via the harness Run /track-starter with no argument. Reproduce the reference result, read the key paper, and understand the challenge problem.
03 Submit a PR Fork quantum.harness and open a PR with harness system improvements, your challenge solution in solutions/<track>/<group>/, and one challenge-report reproduction prompt in the PR comments.
04 Demo & advisor review Groups demo their PRs and defend the work in their track room. On the final morning, advisors use their allocated Mac mini awards at their own discretion. Selected groups polish their skills for merge and share their challenge history for research analysis.

// 02 — Call for Challenges

We are collecting challenge ideas across all method tracks. The only requirement is a well-posed issue that may potentially lead to a research output, plus a contact email for follow-up. Submit a challenge idea.

// 03 — Important Dates

Milestone	Date
Selection begins	June 8, 2026 (rolling)
Application deadline	June 15, 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
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 C108, Hefei National Laboratory, 5099 Wangjiang West Road, Shushan District, Hefei, Anhui.

Contact: office@imfp.org.cn