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 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)