A Fortnight On, Singapore's Million-Qubit Run Is Being Slowed on Purpose

SINGAPORE — The million-qubit processor that ran across the Q-Net backbone on the fourteenth has not been switched off since, but it is deliberately being run slower. Engineers at the Singapore Institute say the point of the fortnight after a milestone is not to repeat it but to find its edges. "A demonstration proves it can be done once," said Dr. Wei-Lin Tan, who has spent the two weeks pushing error rates until the machine falters. "Now we make it fail on purpose, on our schedule, in a room we control, so it never fails on someone else's." The team is mapping how decoherence climbs as qubit counts rise — the wall every quantum architecture eventually hits. None of it moves information faster than light; the Q-Net secures the channel, it does not transmit through it, a distinction Tan repeats to every visitor. The reruns are unglamorous, logged in spreadsheets rather than headlines. That, the engineers say, is precisely the work that turns a demonstration into a tool.