Anthropic Says Claude Cut Quantum Circuit Gates by 17x

Anthropic says its Claude Mythos 5 model designed quantum circuits that improved on earlier designs in seven of eight tasks, including one modular-inversion circuit that used about 17 times fewer gates. The design required 12 more qubits than the smallest previous version, highlighting a tradeoff between processing operations and memory resources. The company described the results from an experiment in which Claude received plain-language specifications for eight computational tasks spanning chemistry, physics simulation, optimization, number theory and numerical computing. An automated evaluator checked and scored the designs. Anthropic said the model refined its circuits through repeated cycles, with no human intervention between those rounds. The standout result involved modular inversion, a mathematical operation used in elliptic-curve arithmetic. It is relevant to quantum algorithms addressing the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. Claude developed a reversible arithmetic method based on divsteps, which simplifies numbers through successive conditional operations. A quantum circuit must preserve information about those steps so it can reverse its calculations,...