Bacon-Shor Board Games
Quantum Physics
2026-02-09 v2 Information Theory
math.IT
Abstract
We identify a period-4 measurement schedule for the checks of the Bacon-Shor code that fully covers spacetime with constant-weight detectors, and is numerically observed to provide the code with a threshold. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not rely on code concatenation and instead arises as the solution to a coloring game on a square grid. Under a uniform circuit-level noise model, we observe a threshold of approximately when decoding with minimum weight perfect matching, and we conjecture that this could be improved using a more tailored decoder.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.02749,
title = {Bacon-Shor Board Games},
author = {M. Sohaib Alam and Jun Zen and Thomas R. Scruby},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.02749},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
10 pages (+ appendix), 12 figures. Comments/feedback welcome