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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT’s) iQuHACK (Interdisciplinary Quantum Hackathon) is MIT’s annual quantum hackathon that aims to bring students from a diverse set of backgrounds and from high school through early-career professionals to explore improvements and applications of near-term quantum devices. The 2024 iteration of the hackathon was held in early February and offered both an in-person hackathon where participants developed and tested their code on real quantum hardware as well as a virtual hackathon for a larger outreach to further students. 

iQuHack was built on a total of seven challenges run by Amazon, IBM, IonQ, Moody’s, Quandela, Quantinuum, and QuEra, which range from Big Tech companies to insurance companies and major quantum computation startups. For each challenge, only first and second prizes were awarded while certain honorable mentions were awarded by some companies.

At last year’s iQuHACK, there were only seven participating Brown University students, and they received a “social” award with a trip to Abu Dhabi. Following that event, four students developed two student organizations at Brown, the Brown Quantum Initiative (BQI), a graduate student organization, and the Quantum Computing Club, an undergraduate student organization.  

This year, the following three Brown University teams placed in the top two in three out of the seven challenges. There was only one other Brown University team that participated in the hackathon. 

Team “Plankton” won 1st Place in the QuEra Challenge - 

3 Undergraduates

• Jeffrey Tejada ‘25 - Chemical Physics

• Kevin Rapp ‘25 - Chemical Physics

• Ishika Tulsian ‘25 - Physics + Computer Science

Team “fATCAT” won 1st Place in the IonQ Challenge - 

4 Undergraduates

• Tomas Dougan ‘25 - Mathematics

• Cerulean Ozarow ‘25 - Applied Mathematics

• Tomoya Sasao ‘26 - Physics

• Arin Idhant ‘26 - Computer Science

Team “Brown Quantum Initiative (BQI)” won 2nd Place in the Amazon Challenge - 

5 Graduate Students

• Miles Miller-Dickson - Engineering PhD

• Alan Bidart - Chemistry PhD

• Junjie Zheng - Physics PhD

• Lindsey Tensen - Physics PhD

• Alexander Buzzi - Physics Master’s

According to Professor of Engineering Chris Rose, “The fact that Brown teams spanned computer science, applied mathematics, mathematics, engineering, chemistry, and physics is a testament to what Brown can be in STEM and what, very likely, others cannot be, owing to our baked-in flat and highly collaborative institutional ethos.”

“Brown students are unlike any I’ve ever taught – anywhere. They are brilliant in a very special way, with a naturally intense, deep, and wide curiosity that would chafe in more siloed environments.” Rose says. “That particular sort of brilliance, coupled to the easy community and communication across fields that defines the Brown intellectual experience, is guaranteed to erupt in the big breakthroughs that often occur at disciplinary interstices.”

Below, we hear from two students, founders of the Brown Quantum Initiative, who participated in the competition and share their experiences of the event:

Miles Miller-Dickson

“This hackathon was all about quantum computing. Basically, there were several sponsors, including IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and each issued a challenge related to some current difficulty in the field of quantum computation (QC), particularly on the algorithms side of things (as opposed to the many significant challenges facing the hardware side of QC).

Our team worked on the AWS challenge, which involved building a ‘noise-aware compiler’, meaning that we had to take in some quantum program that someone may want to run on a quantum computer and convert it into a form that would optimize the fidelity of the output, based on which qubits were behaving well at the time. Quantum circuits today are very, VERY, noisy. And so, a given qubit (the basic unit of computation in QX) may or may not be performing especially well that day, so the program can be automatically rewired to try to get out the best result. Therefore, we developed a scheme for testing which qubits were doing well at the time, and then avoiding the bad qubits. 

Overall, it was a great time at the hackathon. It was my first time and I really liked the idea of devoting all efforts to a singular task for 24 straight hours. Yes, that’s right. I didn’t sleep at all from about 9 AM to 9:30 AM the next day, when I finally took a 20 minute power nap. One of my favorite elements of the challenge was interacting with the various sponsors, asking for their advice on this and that. Each sponsor was only responsible for their own challenge, and we primarily spoke with the AWS folks, but everyone was friendly and other sponsors didn’t mind giving hints that could be useful for the challenges of other sponsors. QC is an emerging field and so it’s a bit competitive (e.g. which architecture will win out in the end?), so it was fun to pit one sponsor against another to try to get more information from them (each sponsor had their designated area and weren’t generally interacting with each other, so we were interlocutors). Alan was especially good at that. I think I heard him say something like, ‘look, we know you guys have the best game in town…’ to about two or three of the sponsors. 

Brown did very well at the competition. Out of the four teams from Brown, three placed. Our team got second in the AWS challenge, and the other two won first place, one for a company called IonQ, and the other for a company called QuEra. One of the strengths that Brown brought to the hackathon is its interdisciplinary culture. I think as a result, our teams had diverse academic backgrounds. I also think our willingness to interact heavily with the sponsors made a big difference.”

Alan Bidart

“I participated in the 2023 edition of iQuHACK, which took place in January of 2023, and it felt very different. My background is in computer science and software engineering, and all the hackathons I had participated in at that point had revolved around CS, engineering, data, or business. iQuHACK was the first hackathon with a strong physics and chemistry component, and for the first time, I met speakers and many participants from the physics and chemistry departments. I was accepted to Brown’s PhD program in chemistry a few weeks after iQuHACK 2023, and my positive experience at that hackathon helped shape my research in quantum information here at Brown and made me come to Brown knowing that I would like to work on hosting a similar quantum hackathon someday. Partly motivated by my experience at that event, Miles and I, along with other colleagues, started a graduate organization called the Brown Quantum Initiative (BQI), which was officially recognized by the GSC earlier this semester, and we are working on planning quantum-related events for graduate students on campus.

This year’s iQuHACK was equally impactful for me. Coming in for a second time, I knew a little bit more about what to expect and I was able to team up with colleagues from BQI. Our team of five was composed of students from the physics, engineering, and chemistry departments, which is pretty ‘Brown’ if you ask me. I am very grateful to be at a university that welcomes cross-disciplinary collaborations since it is the best way to tackle problems in quantum science and engineering, which sit at the intersection of many fields. Thanks to iQuHACK 2024, we also built connections with graduate students and postdocs all around the country, so we hope experiences like these can also span cross-university multidisciplinary collaborations. For now, we are planning to invite some of the amazing graduate students from other universities we met at iQuHACK as speakers in upcoming BQI’s seminars.

Since Miles discussed some ‘personal’ favorite moments, I will share my favorite ‘technical’ moments of the competition. We spent the night of the competition hacking from inside the MIT museum, which was very surreal, but I think boosted our creativity. At some time between 3 AM and 4 AM, we managed to express a problem related to quantum compilers as a graph theory edge-coloring problem, which allowed us to solve it efficiently. This newfound way to express the problem was so beautiful and simple that it made me say ‘you belong in a museum’, but we were in a museum already, which was funny. Also, huge shoutout to Professor Ellis Hershkowitz who taught me a lot about research on graph theory in his CSCI 1952-C course on graph algorithms last semester. I hope I made him proud. I also enjoyed presenting our work to the judges at the end of the competition; we received some great questions from the judges and audience on building reliable benchmarks for quantum computation, which I think might inspire some upcoming work with Miles.  

Thanks to the Brown cross-registration program, Miles and I are taking an advanced physics class on quantum information at Harvard with Professor Mikhail Lukin, a prominent name in quantum computing. Our experience in the class helped us during the competition; it was only possible thanks to Brown’s collaborative policies with other universities, similar to how we are also trying to establish collaborations with graduate students at other universities. So again, thank you, Brown!”

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.