[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":302},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-post-hackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon":3,"sibling-dives-hackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon":299,"learn-track-hackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon":300,"learn-prereq-hackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon":301},{"id":4,"title":5,"authors":6,"body":8,"breadcrumb":268,"builders":272,"byline":273,"category":273,"categoryName":273,"challenge":273,"courseAuthor":273,"courseLead":273,"dek":274,"description":275,"draft":276,"extension":277,"eyebrow":273,"featured":276,"finish":273,"fork":273,"group":273,"groupName":273,"hero":273,"heroAlt":273,"heroCta":273,"heroImage":273,"homepageFeatured":276,"kind":273,"lessonCount":273,"meta":278,"navigation":279,"newsItems":273,"next":273,"node":280,"ogImage":287,"order":273,"outcomes":273,"path":288,"prerequisite":273,"prerequisiteLinks":273,"publishDate":289,"readingTime":273,"related":290,"relatedProjects":273,"section":273,"seo":291,"share":279,"spotlight":276,"stem":293,"tags":294,"track":273,"trackName":273,"updates":273,"__hash__":298},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon.md","Carnegie Mellon University winners: Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026",[7],"qollab",{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":258},"minimark",[11,15,21,24,29,38,46,49,53,56,62,65,68,71,80,88,92,95,100,103,106,109,112,120,127,131,134,137,142,145,148,158,165,169,172,175,238,242,250],[12,13,14],"p",{},"At the Carnegie Mellon University node of the Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026, 21 teams signed up, 14 of them solo. Of the 21, 20 were on the student track and one on the professional track. The online build weekend ran from 7 PM ET on October 9 to 7 PM ET on October 11. In that time, six of the 21 teams entered 12 projects.",[16,17],"youtube-video",{"poster":18,"title":19,"yt":20},"\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Freel-poster.webp","Carnegie Mellon University at the Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026","GHASe_Mbou0",[12,22,23],{},"The projects range from a seven-qubit black hole to quantum dot tuning and a cassette deck whose tape is a quantum state. Every one of them is open source on Qollab.",[25,26,28],"h2",{"id":27},"the-carnegie-mellon-university-node","The Carnegie Mellon University node",[12,30,31,32,37],{},"Jesse Li led the node with Arshia Dabas, a physics student and the president of the ",[33,34,36],"a",{"href":35},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.linkedin.com\u002Fcompany\u002Fcarnegie-mellon-quantum-computing\u002F","Quantum Computing Club at Carnegie Mellon University",".",[12,39,40,41,45],{},"The club has run a student-led lecture series, including a session Jesse and Arshia prepared. Physics majors can also choose a ",[33,42,44],{"href":43},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.cmu.edu\u002Fmcs\u002Fnews-events\u002F2024\u002F0313-physics-quantum-track","quantum physics track",", which the department added after a student proposed it.",[12,47,48],{},"Four judges scored the projects on novelty, technical execution, impact and documentation: Arshia Dabas, Aritra Banerjee, Daniel Justice and Jesse Li of Carnegie Mellon University.",[25,50,52],{"id":51},"_1st-place-the-last-call","1st place: The Last Call",[12,54,55],{},"In The Last Call, your little sister Mira's voice comes through two doors at once, and something outside imitates her. The two halves of the call cancel or reinforce at different dial settings, and you tell Mira from the impostor by that pattern. Checking which door she is at wipes the pattern out, so you choose what to learn before the line goes dead. The team's goal: \"If you come away a little scared and a little more curious about quantum, it worked.\"",[57,58],"blog-figure",{"alt":59,"caption":60,"src":61},"Tanish Singh Rajpal and Abhinaya Nagalla, with a screenshot of The Last Call","Tanish Singh Rajpal and Abhinaya Nagalla","\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fthe-last-call-winner.webp",[12,63,64],{},"Tanish Singh Rajpal and Abhinaya Nagalla were working on a class project together when they decided to team up on the game outside class. Both are master's students in information security at Carnegie Mellon. Tanish worked on the game's quantum mechanics as quantum lead, and Abhinaya designed its concept as creative lead. Picking the idea was the hardest part. They went through a memory game and a build-your-own-story game before settling on horror, a genre they both love.",[12,66,67],{},"The Last Call's physics comes from the Mach-Zehnder interferometer and the quantum eraser. The game sends one batched job of 56 circuits to Qollab's built-in simulator, and each call uses one measured shot.",[12,69,70],{},"Tanish and Abhinaya are proudest of putting the game in augmented reality. You place the haunted house on your own floor or table, and when you open the wrong door, the creature's face fills your whole screen. Next, they want to explore quantum in art.",[72,73,77],"pull-quote",{"avatar":74,"name":75,"role":76},"\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fthe-last-call-avatar.webp","Team Popeyes","The Last Call",[12,78,79],{},"I thought quantum computing was not beginner-friendly, but now I feel that even if I don't know quantum mechanics in absolute depth, I can still make interesting things with it.",[81,82],"project-card",{"builder":83,"description":84,"owner":85,"thumb":86,"title":76,"to":87},"Tanish Singh Rajpal, Abhinaya Nagalla","A quantum horror game played with three tools: Listen, Trace and Erase.","tanishsinghrajpal","\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fthe-last-call.webp","\u002Fu\u002Ftanishsinghrajpal\u002Fthe-last-call",[25,89,91],{"id":90},"_2nd-place-quantum-foundry","2nd place: Quantum Foundry",[12,93,94],{},"In Quantum Foundry, you wire up quantum circuits part by part, and the ones that pass inspection become reusable components. Anissa Li led team meow, four Carnegie Mellon classmates who built the game with no quantum experience before the hackathon.",[57,96],{"alt":97,"caption":98,"src":99},"Kenneth, Anissa Li, Maverick Pil and Yujie Wu, with a screenshot of Quantum Foundry","Kenneth, Anissa Li, Maverick Pil and Yujie Wu","\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fquantum-foundry-winner.webp",[12,101,102],{},"The idea came from Turing Complete, a game where you learn how computers work by building one from a single NAND gate. The campaign's 16 missions run from a single wire to the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm. Mission 8, Quantum Courier, uses the BellPrep and BellDecode blocks you built two missions earlier. With a shared Bell pair, you send two classical bits by sending one qubit.",[12,104,105],{},"The hardest part was keeping the quantum math right. The team wrote its own statevector simulator in JavaScript, so the game runs offline in the browser. On 48 reference circuits, the simulator has to match Qiskit to one part in 10¹⁵, and an optional Qiskit service regrades every mission.",[12,107,108],{},"Chapter 3 comes next, with missions on Grover's search, quantum arithmetic and error correction. After that, the team plans noise-aware puzzles built on IonQ's Aria and Forte noise models.",[12,110,111],{},"Team meow also entered Quantum Arcade, Entangled Bodies, Grovers Ocean and Quantum Coin Trick.",[72,113,117],{"avatar":114,"name":115,"role":116},"\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fquantum-foundry-avatar.webp","Team meow","Quantum Foundry",[12,118,119],{},"Build before you read. One hour of placing gates and watching the state panel teaches more than ten hours of definitions, because every term you meet afterwards — amplitude, superposition, entanglement — already points at something you've touched. You need far less math than you fear to start.",[81,121],{"builder":122,"description":123,"owner":124,"thumb":125,"title":116,"to":126},"Kenneth, Anissa Li, Maverick Pil, Yujie Wu","A puzzle game that teaches quantum computing by making you build it.","anissali","\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fquantum-foundry.webp","\u002Fu\u002Fanissali\u002Fquantum-foundry",[25,128,130],{"id":129},"_3rd-place-qverify-lab","3rd place: QVerify Lab",[12,132,133],{},"QVerify Lab helps researchers check that a quantum circuit performed the right operation. Shreya Girish Savadatti built it on her own. She is a second-year master's student at Carnegie Mellon and a quantum computing researcher at the National Laboratory of the Rockies.",[12,135,136],{},"QVerify Lab's default audit puts a phase error of 1.00π on a four-qubit cat-state circuit and runs 512 shots on Qollab's free local simulator. It compares the ordinary output test with a lightweight targeted test for the known error and a stronger two-basis reference.",[57,138],{"alt":139,"caption":140,"src":141},"Shreya Girish Savadatti, with a screenshot of QVerify Lab: Catch the Quantum Errors Your Histogram Misses","Shreya Girish Savadatti","\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fqverify-lab-catch-the-quantum-winner.webp",[12,143,144],{},"Shreya benchmarked six public circuits from QASMBench. At a full phase flip with mild synthetic noise and 512 shots, the ordinary output test caught none of 100 changes on any circuit. The targeted test and the two-basis reference caught all 100 on every circuit.",[12,146,147],{},"Next, Shreya wants to test QVerify Lab on real quantum hardware. Her goal is a verification layer that researchers could use when they send jobs to remote hardware.",[72,149,152,155],{"avatar":150,"name":140,"role":151},"\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fqverify-lab-catch-the-quantum-avatar.webp","QVerify Lab",[12,153,154],{},"The aha moment was realizing that the ordinary output could be perfectly correct, with an exact output-distribution distance of zero, while the underlying quantum operation was still wrong.",[12,156,157],{},"It made the distinction between checking an answer and checking a quantum process incredibly tangible. The same experiment could look completely trustworthy through one measurement and clearly faulty through another.",[81,159],{"builder":140,"description":160,"owner":161,"thumb":162,"title":163,"to":164},"A verification dashboard that shows how much evidence backs each result.","shreyasavadatti","\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fqverify-lab-catch-the-quantum.webp","QVerify Lab: Catch the Quantum Errors Your Histogram Misses","\u002Fu\u002Fshreyasavadatti\u002Fqverify-lab-catch-the-quantum",[25,166,168],{"id":167},"every-other-project-from-carnegie-mellon-university","Every other project from Carnegie Mellon University",[12,170,171],{},"AirQOpt and CrewCut QAOA both apply QAOA to planning: AirQOpt to flight routes, CrewCut QAOA to storm repair crews.",[12,173,174],{},"The other 9 projects entered at the node, A to Z.",[176,177,178,186,193,199,206,212,219,226,232],"ul",{},[179,180,181,185],"li",{},[33,182,184],{"href":183},"\u002Fu\u002Fbriannaj_ok\u002Fqaoa-route-deconfliction-for-e","AirQOpt: QAOA Route Deconfliction for EW-Denied Airspace",": A workflow from TrajAir ADS-B tracks to constraint-preserving quantum optimization.",[179,187,188,192],{},[33,189,191],{"href":190},"\u002Fu\u002FSuperAtomic\u002FCrewCut_QOAO","CrewCut QAOA (Team Briskit!)",": A quantum circuit that assigns storm repairs to two crews, with one qubit for each repair, tested against standard QAOA, utility dispatch rules and classical search.",[179,194,195],{},[33,196,198],{"href":197},"\u002Fu\u002Fmpil\u002Fentangled-bodies","Entangled Bodies",[179,200,201,205],{},[33,202,204],{"href":203},"\u002Fu\u002Fannabellechoi\u002Fgetting-information-back-out-o","Getting Information Back Out of a Black Hole",": A 7-qubit black hole on a quantum computer.",[179,207,208],{},[33,209,211],{"href":210},"\u002Fu\u002Fmpil\u002Fgrovers-ocean","Grovers Ocean",[179,213,214,218],{},[33,215,217],{"href":216},"\u002Fu\u002Fakshparekh\u002Fmr-quantum","Mr. Quantum: Learn how to Fine-tune Quantum Dot Qubits",": Learn how to fine-tune quantum circuits interactively on our visual-native system.",[179,220,221,225],{},[33,222,224],{"href":223},"\u002Fu\u002Fsopren\u002Fqassette-music-on-quantum-tape","qassette - music on quantum tape",": A cassette deck where the tape is a quantum state: audio becomes 8-qubit amplitude-encoded frames, effects are QFT-domain gates, storage decoheres like a real mechanical qubit memory, and playback is pure measurement statistics.",[179,227,228],{},[33,229,231],{"href":230},"\u002Fu\u002Famazingkenneth\u002Fquantum-arcade","Quantum Arcade",[179,233,234],{},[33,235,237],{"href":236},"\u002Fu\u002Fmpil\u002Fquantum-coin-trick","Quantum Coin Trick",[25,239,241],{"id":240},"carnegie-mellon-university-on-qollab","Carnegie Mellon University on Qollab",[12,243,244,245,249],{},"Specialty awards follow on Wed Oct 28 and global winners on Thu Oct 29, and the ",[33,246,248],{"href":247},"\u002Fexplore\u002Fhackathon-2026","Hackathon 2026 results page"," links to every node's post.",[12,251,252,253,257],{},"Open any project on Carnegie Mellon University's ",[33,254,256],{"href":255},"https:\u002F\u002Fqollab.xyz\u002Fnodes\u002Fcarnegie-mellon-qc","node page on Qollab"," to read its code, run it and fork it. You can also follow the node there. The page shows the node's numbers, its members and node team, and all 12 hackathon projects.",{"title":259,"searchDepth":260,"depth":260,"links":261},"",2,[262,263,264,265,266,267],{"id":27,"depth":260,"text":28},{"id":51,"depth":260,"text":52},{"id":90,"depth":260,"text":91},{"id":129,"depth":260,"text":130},{"id":167,"depth":260,"text":168},{"id":240,"depth":260,"text":241},[269,270,271],"Qollab","Explore","Hackathon 2026: Carnegie Mellon University",[],null,"Three winning projects from 12 entered at the Carnegie Mellon University node.","The Last Call took 1st place at the Carnegie Mellon University node of the Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026. Meet all 3 winning projects, open source on Qollab.",false,"md",{},true,{"slug":281,"name":282,"logo":283},"carnegie-mellon-qc","Carnegie Mellon University",{"src":284,"width":285,"height":286},"\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon\u002Flogo-cmu.png",388,40,"\u002F_content\u002Fimages\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon\u002Fshare.jpg","\u002Fblog\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon","2026-10-27",[],{"title":292,"description":275},"Carnegie Mellon winners, Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026","blog\u002Fhackathon-2026\u002Fcarnegie-mellon",[295,296,297],"hackathon","ionq","quantum","V_luUqWakYnIaaRNxmHJudiU1tNzmG2o35Nxc1LQgq4",[],[],[],1793105466922]