Comment by keeganryan

This builds on the Kickmix quantum language from Google. Essentially, Kickmix is an assembly language for classically simulatable quantum circuits, and finding more efficient circuits is basically a game of code golf with the assembly instructions. That means LLMs benefit from the closed loop of verification, and can rapidly test and discard ideas. It's not too surprising that previous academics didn't try to optimize to this level, and a good task to automate. See ecdsa.fail for another example of circuit optimization using the Kickmix language.