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Auditing Emergence in Quantum Error Correction: A Falsifiable Instantiation of Six Birds Theory
The theory is pointed at a real engineering problem, and fourteen of its predictions fail on the record.
In plain words
Six Birds makes one big promise. Take its tools to any field where small parts get packed into a stable big thing, and they will produce claims you can check. This paper takes that promise seriously. The field is quantum error correction. The big thing is a logical qubit, built out of many noisy physical ones.
Before each experiment ran, the predictions were written down and frozen. Twenty five of them. Fourteen failed, and the paper reports every failure as it was frozen. Four of the six tools produced real, useful audit objects. One tool, pricing, was built exactly and failed every test. One was set aside from the start.
The heart of the paper is a repair. One failed prediction, a drift detector that only looks at syndromes, is diagnosed using the theory's own machinery, fixed, and registered again. The fix comes with a new prediction: the repaired detector will still lose on the original test. It did. Then it wins on harder noise and inside a live decoder loop. Everything runs again byte for byte from the public code.
What it shows
- A frozen set of predictions, with fourteen failures reported unaltered.
- A failure diagnosed and repaired using only the framework's own tools.
- A drift detector that beats a budget matched blind schedule under circuit level noise.
What it does not claim
It does not introduce any new error correction mechanism. The techniques are known. What is new is the audit framing and the discipline around it.
Cite
Tsiokos, I. (2026). Auditing Emergence in Quantum Error Correction: A Falsifiable Instantiation of Six Birds Theory. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22337886