Taiwan-IBM Quantum Hackathon Showcases International Collaboration and Progress
The National Taiwan University-IBM Quantum Computer Center recently hosted its 2026 Quantum Computing Hackathon, which drew over 80 participants from around the world. The event was held August 12-14 at the Department of Physics and Solid State Theory Center at National Taiwan University. This year's hackathon marked a return to in-person events after being canceled in 2021 due to the pandemic.
International collaboration was a key feature of the event, with teams from Keio University in Japan, Yonsei University in South Korea, and the Czech Technical University in Prague joining Taiwanese participants. One winning team developed a variational quantum circuit framework that required significantly fewer trainable parameters than standard multilayer perceptron models.
The hackathon showcased the potential of quantum computing education and outreach, with teams exploring various applications, including mitigating limitations in quantum computation, tensor network-based approximate quantum compilation, and catastrophic forgetting in quantum continual learning. A team successfully reproduced 16 correct action decisions out of 16 on IBM's Marrakesh quantum hardware using quantum reinforcement learning.
The event demonstrated progress in both algorithm design and hardware utilization, highlighting the growing importance of international collaboration in advancing quantum computing technology.