Cycle 01
The frontier,
mapped.
Research groups in quantum. Every one names the result that would end it, and every result gets published — including the ones that do.
The map is empty because nothing has been admitted yet. It fills one group at a time, and nothing ever leaves it — a project that meets its own kill criterion stays on as a hollow marker, permanently, because that is the most durable thing this place produces.
Every group states this first
“If decoder accuracy on real device data stays within 1% of the uniform-noise baseline, the premise is wrong and there is nothing here worth six months.”
Not a risk. Not a caveat. A result you could actually reach that would mean stopping. It is snapshotted when a group is admitted and the midpoint review tests them against it verbatim, so it cannot be softened on the way there.
How it works
01
Anyone can propose
No lab, no PhD, no affiliation. Leads put up one piece of prior work — a paper, a repository, a writeup — reviewed once and carried across cycles. An empty affiliation is not a mark against you. People outside institutions are much of who this is for.
02
Name what would kill it
Before the method, before the timeline, you state the finding that would end the project. Proposals whose falsifier turns out to be a risk rather than a result are the most common decline, and the fastest one to make.
03
Killing it counts as finishing
A group that meets its own criterion and stops publishes the negative result and closes as completed on criterion. A clean answer in eight weeks beats eight months of drift, and quantum has nowhere to put those answers today.
What a group gets
- Collaborators, screened and matched inside a fixed cycle.
- A deadline and a midpoint review. Side research dies of drift far more often than it dies of anything else.
- A workspace that records what you ruled out, not only what worked.
- A public record with your name and contribution on it.
What it does not
- No funding. Cogitan has no budget for this yet and would rather say so than imply otherwise.
- No lab access and no fridge time. Groups here do software, theory, and data — most of what a distributed team can do in any case.
- No guaranteed seat. Three applications per person per cycle, and leads pick.
Before we ask it of you
Everything above is a promise until Cycle 01 runs. What is not a promise is that Cogitan already publishes on these terms — the directions that ended, the reason each one ended, and a paper whose abstract states where it stops.
Closed
Room-temperature spin registers
All eight died. Six to prior art, two to a fabrication dependency, none to physics — and every one terminated in the same place.…
Closed
Learned readout discrimination
It died twice, in two sessions, for $0 each.…
Preprint
How gently can a protected quantum memory be read? Rate limits on logical readout from the structure of the code
Stated limits: Leading order in the measurement rate, single-mode Markovian limit, and the framework cannot express canonical phase mea…
The frontier starts empty.
Cycle 01 opens once there are enough people to fill it properly. Groups get placed, not posted into a void — so the list comes first and the cohort second.