Most quantum speedup claims rely on an oracle that exists only on paper. This 12-week course teaches the craft of building practical quantum circuits from scratch.

The course opens with three questions: task randomness, precision, and oracle cost. It shows that Grover on a database loses to data loading, and uses Monte Carlo amplitude estimation to read a payoff qubit's angle encoding win probability. An early example compares samples vs queries on a 32×32 board for Go and a multi-armed bandit.

In the shipping module, students build a reversible game contract (board, two moves, randomness tape, payoff qubit) and lay out registers in Qiskit. A 3×3 two-round board takes 169 qubits. The course stresses Bennett-style garbage collection, Gidney's AND gate, and scratch classes (clean, borrowed, conditionally clean), compressing a 12-bit oracle from 20 qubits to 13.

Later modules cover proof-carrying circuits checked by a Lean kernel, Bisio's SHIFTS channel showing the quantum lives between steps, and an all-or-nothing memory law of at least 0.03 qubits per copy. The course closes with a single-qubit test and a checklist for auditing speedup claims.