Humans, Agents, and Shor: Open Autoresearch for Quantum Circuit Optimization

Date and time: Oct 17 2026 Noon - 14:00 EDT ( 18:00 - 20:00 CET)
Title: Humans, Agents, and Shor: Open Autoresearch for Quantum Circuit Optimization
Abstract:
What happens when a hard scientific optimization problem is opened up to a community of humans and AI agents, with every proposed improvement checked automatically? In this talk, Dr. Bartosz Naskrecki will present ECDSA.Fail, an open effort to optimize the reversible secp256k1 point-addition circuit that forms a key bottleneck in Shor’s algorithm for attacking elliptic-curve cryptography.

Using a public evaluator, repository, and leaderboard, participants reduced the benchmark’s qubit–Toffoli product by 86.1%, reaching 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.30 million executed Toffoli gates at the paper’s cutoff. Dr.Naskrecki will highlight several of the circuit ideas behind this progress, including new approaches to reversible modular inversion, transcript compression, register sharing, and specialized arithmetic.
More broadly, Dr. Naskrecki will discuss Open Autoresearch: a model in which human judgment, AI-driven experimentation, and machine-checkable verification combine to produce cumulative, reproducible progress on difficult technical problems.

Speaker: Dr Bartosz Naskręcki is a graduate of Adam Mickiewicz University and specializes in number theory and algebraic geometry. After obtaining his doctorate in 2014, he completed several years of research internships in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Bristol, UK, and at the Dioscuri TDA Center in Warsaw. For over four years, he has been collaborating with Prof. Mariusz Jaskólski in the field of mathematical crystallography, which culminated in a sectional lecture at the European Crystallography Congress ECM 2025. In 2022 and 2023, he received the Crystallography Diamonds award twice, granted by the Crystallography Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a co-author of the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. In 2025, he co-created the most difficult mathematical test for LLMs, the FrontierMath project. His mathematical problem was included in the most difficult variant of this Tier 4 test, which has so far resisted all the most powerful language models. He is passionate about teaching students at the intersection of computer science and mathematics, teaching courses in areas such as cryptography, mathematical computing in Python, and the use of large language models in mathematical and programming work. He is interested in all aspects of the use of computers in groundbreaking mathematical work.
Dr. Bartosz Naskręcki is also an active popularizer of knowledge, especially regarding the contribution of Polish cryptologists to breaking the Enigma machine code. He received the Polish Mathematical Society's award for young mathematicians for 2013, and in 2010 he was honored in the Józef Marcinkiewicz Competition for the best student work in mathematics. Outside of science, he is a husband and father of two children. In his free time, he is an avid gardener, a fanatic lawn lover, and an avocado grower.

Moderator: Dr. Pawel Gora CEO of Quantum AI Foundation