High school student · Class of 2027

Austin Amissah

I am a student at The Lawrenceville School, and outside class I work on projects in physics, computation, and energy. The main one works out the cheapest way to run a home solar battery, which for a real Colorado home comes to $456 a year on top of the $971 its panels save, and once you see the arithmetic it fits on a napkin. What surprised me was that a bigger battery earns nothing, because what pays is how fast the battery can empty rather than how much it holds. After that I wrote the quantum version of the problem and ran small cases of it on a real quantum computer to see what survived the noise, which led to a way of asking the question in under half the qubits, although the full day is still too big for today's hardware.

My second project is about the math that decides who owns every Bitcoin. After reproducing the best known quantum circuit for breaking it, I published that the circuit could not be improved, and over the next three weeks a single automated searcher improved it 25 times. So I went back to measure what an improvement costs to find.

Every number my own programs produce traces to code you can run, and where a figure comes from somewhere else, I say where. I write up what I find, including the parts that did not work.

The overview covers all three projects in brief. Or start with the interactives: run the battery optimizer or drag points on the Bitcoin curve. The solar project's corrections are collected at what I got wrong. The circuit project's begin with the claim I had to take back.