QOuLiPo: What a quantum computer sees when it reads a book
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2605.14188 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 13 May 2026] Title:QOuLiPo: What a quantum computer sees when it reads a book Authors:Christophe Jurczak View a PDF of the paper titled QOuLiPo: What a quantum computer sees when it reads a book, by Christophe Jurczak View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:What does a book look like to a quantum computer? This paper takes eight classical works of the Renaissance and its late-antique inheritance -- from Augustine to Galileo -- and runs each through a neutral-atom quantum processor. The bridge is graphs: each textual unit becomes an atom, and graph edges are physical blockade constraints for engineered exact unit-disk designs, or a 2D approximation to the semantic graph for natural texts. Three contributions follow. First, we introduce rigidity rho, a metric for how unique a book's structural backbone is -- distinguishing Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron (rigid, twelve-nouvelle hard core) from Boethius (fully fungible, every chapter substitutable). Second, we invert the pipeline: rather than extracting a graph from existing prose, we pick a target graph the hardware encodes natively, and write a book whose structure matches it. The twenty-nine texts written this way, collected under the name QOuLiPo, extend the OuLiPo tradition to graph-topological constraints and, together with the eight natural texts, form a benchmark distribution against which neutral-atom hardware can be tracked as it scales. Third, we run both natural and engineered texts on Pasqal's FRESNEL processor up to one hundred atoms; engineered texts reach high approximation ratios, the cleanest instances returning the exact backbone. A cloud-accessible quantum machine plus an agentic coding environment now lets a single investigator run this pipeline end-to-end. What is reported is an application layer, not a speedup -- humanistic instances ready to load onto neutral-atom processors as they scale, already complementing classical text analysis.
The Digital Humanities community has a stake in building familiarity with this hardware now: the engineered-corpus design choices made today fix the benchmark distribution future hardware will be measured against. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Digital Libraries (cs.DL); Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2605.14188 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2605.14188v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.14188 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Christophe Jurczak [view email] [v1] Wed, 13 May 2026 23:10:15 UTC (6,068 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled QOuLiPo: What a quantum computer sees when it reads a book, by Christophe JurczakView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL cs.DL physics physics.atom-ph References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)