English

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 0.3%0.3\% when decoding with minimum weight perfect matching, and we conjecture that this could be improved using a more tailored decoder.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:45:34.397Z