{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sparse-blossom-correcting-a-million-errors","title":"Sparse Blossom: correcting a million errors per core second with minimum-weight matching","arxiv_id":"2303.15933","date":"2023-03-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Oscar Higgott","Craig Gidney"],"abstract":"In this work, we introduce a fast implementation of the minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) decoder, the most widely used decoder for several important families of quantum error correcting codes, including surface codes. Our algorithm, which we call sparse blossom, is a variant of the blossom algorithm which directly solves the decoding problem relevant to quantum error correction. Sparse blossom avoids the need for all-to-all Dijkstra searches, common amongst MWPM decoder implementations. For 0.1% circuit-level depolarising noise, sparse blossom processes syndrome data in both $X$ and $Z$ bases of distance-17 surface code circuits in less than one microsecond per round of syndrome extraction on a single core, which matches the rate at which syndrome data is generated by superconducting quantum computers. Our implementation is open-source, and has been released in version 2 of the PyMatching library.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15933v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.15933v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sparse-blossom-correcting-a-million-errors","repo_url":"https://github.com/oscarhiggott/PyMatching","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}},{"paper_slug":"sparse-blossom-correcting-a-million-errors","repo_url":"https://github.com/yuewuo/fusion-blossom","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.15933","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}