Lesson 140: Cost models for QPUs
Focus
Separate statistical noise from calibration drift before claiming algorithm wins. Token Cost models for QPUs:140 keeps neighbouring lessons differentiable.
Key ideas
- Thread: Cost models for QPUs · drill v10 · spin
545883. - Habit: pair each job with shot budget, mitigation profile, and a calibration fingerprint you could paste.
- Guardrail: write one line about where classical cost dominated the timeline.
Deep dive notebook
Synthetic drill artefacts
Simulator-vs-hardware rollup
| Artefact | Honesty check |
|----------|---------------|
| Exact statevector (n<21) | qubit ceiling note |
| Noisy emulation | pauli/channel parity |
| Device trace | leakage / crosstalk tag `med` |
Hypothesis `parity oscillation damping` ties lesson 140 to observables not vibes.
Practice
Practice Paste the circuit scaffold into an experiment wiki stub and annotate topology constraints. — 140 Bump literals mindset by 23.