RIFT winners: Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026

At the RIFT node of the Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026, 19 teams signed up, 15 of them solo. Of the 19, 11 were on the student track and 8 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, nine of the 19 teams entered 13 projects.

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The projects range from quantum tic-tac-toe for solar and wind players to a virtual spectroscopy lab and a forecaster for chaotic time series. Every one of them is open source on Qollab.

The RIFT node

The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC signed on in September. Later that month, the node merged with a second site at Universidad EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia. The two sites run as one node, named after RIFT Labs at Catholic University.

Dr. Daniel Sierra-Sosa, an assistant professor of computer science at Catholic University, led the node with Jorge Saavedra, a PhD student there. Dr. Sierra-Sosa leads RIFT Labs' quantum research on hardware-aware algorithms, quantum machine learning and quantum-safe cryptography. The two are organising Qiskit Fall Fest at Catholic University from November 16 to 18, 2026.

Five judges from RIFT Labs scored the projects on novelty, technical execution, impact and documentation. They were Dr. Daniel Sierra-Sosa, José M. Ramírez-Gómez, Juan Guillermo Lalinde, Daniela Angulo-Murcillo and Mauricio D. Correa-Hernández.

1st place: qWard: A Quantum Computing Adventure

In qWard, players build circuits to solve problems for curious neighbours. The game teaches quantum computing through problems familiar from classical software: fair choices, searching, hidden information and cryptography. For the hackathon, xthecapx (team Thecap) brought the existing game to Qollab and added an interactive campus and a customisable quantum lab.

Coin Town: settle who goes first and discover gates, superposition and measurement.

Foundry Town: search sixteen hidden PINs with interference and Grover's algorithm.

Hollow Town: question an oracle and use phase kickback to recover the 25-bit Ghost Key.

Cipher Town: intercept messages and work up from simple ciphers to a tiny RSA key, broken by Shor's algorithm factoring 15.

Challenge medals open new roads and add equipment to the lab, and the game plays in English or Spanish. The game is named after the qWard library for analysing quantum circuits, which xthecapx is developing as part of a PhD.

qWard: A Quantum Computing Adventureu/xthecapxAn adventure game of quantum searches, ghostly secrets and a cryptographic heist.

2nd place: Quantum Compiler Arena

Quantum Compiler Arena is a puzzle game where you make quantum circuits cheaper without changing what they do. Nafees Nashiz Khan, an MSc student in Quantum Technology at Uppsala University, built it on his own. Teams picked a node when they signed up or let the Qollab team place them, and he entered on the professional track. He started the Arena to put the theory from his quantum information studies into practice.

You can delete a gate, swap a few for simpler ones or start from empty wires. The Arena then shows whether the answer is correct next to what it costs. Harder puzzles add connection rules, so a solution with fewer gates can still fall short if the hardware cannot make the connections the circuit needs.

Nafees had to make sure a simpler circuit really did the same thing. "Two circuits may give the same measurements for one starting state and still behave differently on other inputs." He compares full unitaries as well as sampled results, so an answer passes only when it matches the original circuit's operation.

Next, Nafees wants a step-by-step view of how the maths and the quantum state change as you edit a circuit. Puzzles on circuit cutting and on running parts of a circuit across several quantum processors would follow.

Seeing a Bell circuit pass check and use fewer gates was the moment it came together. I could see how the game would help someone learn by trying things themselves.

Quantum Compiler ArenaNafees Nashiz Khan · u/altzA puzzle game that teaches quantum compilation: circuit optimisation, qubit placement and routing.

3rd place: Algorithmic Ash

Algorithmic Ash is a wildfire simulator that compares how quantum and classical algorithms deploy firefighting crews. Nafees placed a second time with it, again working on his own. He wanted a game for testing strategies when water and supplies are limited.

Players pick a scenario, one quantum bot and one classical bot, then press "Run live" and watch both bots fight the same fire. Changing the wind, cutting the water or raising crew costs shows how each bot's choices change. The quantum bots use variants of QAOA and VQE, and the classical ones use greedy search, annealing and exact enumeration. The circuits run in a browser simulator, with Qiskit Aer and NumPy checking the results.

Nafees is proud of the Decision room. It lists the missions each bot chose, what they cost and any classical repair, so players can investigate every result.

Next on Nafees's list are crew travel times and guided challenges that help beginners build their first bot. He also entered a third project, Spectroscopy Lab.

Getting the bots to actually contain the fire was the hardest part. They were making decisions, but almost the whole map would still burn. Even the exact solver struggled.

Algorithmic AshNafees Nashiz Khan · u/altzA wildfire strategy game where quantum and classical bots decide where limited crews and supplies go.

Every other project from RIFT

Three of the other projects are about parties that share quantum states. Team Pauli's BB84 and E91 protocols check for an eavesdropper, Entanglert's network has malicious participants, and in Entangled Qonsensus the parties are blockchain validators.

Team TrapCraft's two entries work with trapped ions: a Paul-trap laser lab, and a synthesizer driven by the ions' phonon bus.

The other 10 projects entered at the node, A to Z.

• BB84 and E91 Protocol: Implement and analyze the BB84 and E91 protocols using Qiskit, evaluating the detection of potential eavesdropping attempts through the quantum error rate and Bell's inequality.
• Entangled Qonsensus: W-State Leaders & GHZ Votes: Validators share one distributed W state to elect a block leader, then accept the block through a GHZ phase vote.
• Entanglert: Explorando comportamientos maliciosos en una red cuántica: Entanglert es una aplicación que permite explorar el comportamiento de una red cuántica frente a participantes maliciosos mediante el uso de correlaciones cuánticas.
• Green energy optimization game: We built Q-GEPO: Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe, Green Grid Edition, a two-player Colab game where Solar and Wind players place quantum marks across pairs of empty squares.
• IonSynth: Phonon-Bus FM: Trapped-ion Playground synth: MS phonon bus (COM/stretch) drives FM rate, entanglement depth sets FM index, Bloch shapes timbre; one backend.run for rhythm.
• Manyfold Reverb · notebook
• QPRC: QPRC is a quantum machine learning framework leveraging the Hilbert space dynamics of IonQ backends as a reservoir to forecast chaotic time-series, bypassing barren plateaus without optimization overhead.
• Quantum Harmonizer: Transforming IonQ Quantum Superposition & Entanglement into Algorithmic Music using Qiskit.
• Spectroscopy Lab: Step into a virtual lab, investigate an unknown compound with eight spectroscopy tools, and piece together the clues from quantum simulations and classical models to work out what’s in your sample.
• TrapCraft: Trapped-Ion Laser Lab: Interactive Paul-trap lab: fire IonQ-native GPI/GPI2/MS pulses (turns) on ¹⁷¹Yb⁺ ions, watch the phonon bus entangle non-neighbors, complete 3 missions, and export real Qiskit, one IonQ-safe Run.

RIFT on Qollab

Specialty awards follow on Wed Oct 28 and global winners on Thu Oct 29, and the Hackathon 2026 results page links to every node's post.

Open any project on RIFT's 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 all 13 hackathon projects.