Two More Labs, and the Honesty Tax
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Two More Labs, and the Honesty Tax
Two more open, in-browser labs are live, and both made me pay what I’ve started calling the honesty tax — the cost of reporting the result that doesn’t sell.
QLab is a quantum-computing lab that runs the real frameworks — Qiskit, PennyLane, Cirq, Stim — on 20 worked cases, and for each one it runs the classical baseline right next to the quantum one. The honest finding, with the numbers on screen, is the one nobody markets:
At lab scale, classical still wins. QLab does flag the genuinely quantum stuff — CHSH really violates the classical bound, S = 2√2 > 2 — but it labels that as nonlocality, not a speedup. Every committed trace ran on a simulator; there is no real-hardware claim hiding anywhere.
The interesting engineering is the Problem × Solver shape: a method-agnostic problem meets a thin adapter over each framework, so the same MaxCut or Grover case runs through five engines and you compare them like-for-like. The browser runs an exact TypeScript state-vector simulator for the small cases (≤ 12 qubits) live; the rest are precomputed and replayed.
PINN-Lab is the other one — a runnable catalogue of 19 Physics-Informed Neural Network cases. The architecture I like: train each PINN offline with DeepXDE, validate it against an analytic / FEM / real-data anchor, export to ONNX, and then let the browser re-infer it live with onnxruntime-web. Because the physical parameter is a network input, you drag a slider and the trained network re-solves the PDE in real time.
And the honesty tax again: I publish the relative-L2 for every case, including the ones that sit at the known PINN limits — Helmholtz around 10%, the lid-driven cavity around 17% — because pretending PINNs are uniformly accurate would make the whole catalogue useless as a map of where they actually work. Only one of the 19 cases is trained on real data (NOAA soil temperatures); the rest are honest synthetic anchors, labeled as such. It is not a replacement for a good FEM solver, and it says so. QLab source · PINN-Lab source.