State
Number about the machine
A figure of merit for the hardware itself — an average error rate, a largest circuit it can actually run — together with the protocol that produced it and the confidence it was established at. It answers a question about the computer, never a question the computer was asked.
A state is an object you can be holding, named once so that two routes reaching the same thing are drawn as reaching the same thing. It says nothing about how you got here or where you can go next — that is entirely in the processes below.
This is a kind of
This state is not recorded as a kind of anything else. It stands on its own in the vocabulary.
Narrower kinds of this
No state in the vocabulary is recorded as a narrower kind of this one.
Records that are this object
Nothing in the catalogue has been joined to this state. That is a gap in the join rather than a claim that no such object exists; the shelf on /repository lists what is joined and what is not, with the reason.
Work that arrives here
- Measure what the machine can actually do
Run a protocol whose answer is already known, on the hardware, and read the machine's own performance off how far the result falls short. Nothing here computes anything a user wanted — the point is that the answer is known in advance, because that is what makes the shortfall a measurement.
Work that starts here
No recorded process takes this as its input. Nothing in this graph leaves from here.