What each one is, how it works, and where it stands, with the code behind it.
Running a home battery on the cheapest schedule is worth $456 a year for a real Colorado home, and the number has a closed form: eight kilowatt-hours sold in the four peak hours, every weekday. I built an exact optimizer to confirm it on all 365 days from public Department of Energy data, then sent small versions of the problem to an IBM quantum machine six times, writing my prediction down before each run. At six time slots the circuit already needs more gates than the noise allows, and the full day would take 52 qubits. The ordinary computer solves it in microseconds. The open question is what the quantum side is good for yet.
ECDSA.fail is an open competition to find the most efficient quantum computer circuit for breaking the cryptography that guards Bitcoin. Besides beating the best score on the leaderboard, a submission has to pass a correctness test generated from the circuit itself, so every edit re-rolls the test. Landing an improvement means searching millions of re-rolled candidates for one that passes, a cost the score does not count. I measured that cost, built a filter that spots a failing candidate in milliseconds instead of the official checker’s twenty seconds, and lost my own attempt to a leaderboard that moved faster than my laptop could search.