A selection service, taken seriously

EigenSelect resolves bounded selection problems on physical quantum hardware and documents the event to an evidentiary standard. A customer submits a selection, whether it has two outcomes or six thousand, and receives back a resolved outcome together with a report covering the complete chain: canonicalization, commitment, physical execution, and resolution.

The service exists for situations where how a selection was made matters as much as the selection itself: raffle draws that participants will scrutinize, decisions that deserve a defensible record, occasions where the answer should arrive with its provenance attached.

The instrument

Selections are executed on an IQM Crystal‑54: 54 superconducting transmon qubits held at approximately 15 millikelvin, accessed through Scaleway Quantum‑as‑a‑Service. Each selection is one circuit executed with exactly one shot, which is one preparation of a uniform superposition, one measurement, one collapse. The processor's native gate set contains no Hadamard gate, so the superposition circuit is decomposed into native r-gate rotations, and the hash committed before execution is the hash of that decomposed circuit, the one that physically runs.

Outcome counts that are not powers of two are handled by rejection sampling: measurements outside the selection domain are documented and the identical circuit is re-executed, at our expense, to a limit of 42 attempts. For a nine-entry raffle the probability of exhausting that limit is approximately 8 × 10⁻¹⁶. The limit exists to be documented, not to be reached.

Hardware type, provider, and technology are checked against the platform registry before every submission. If the physical backend cannot be verified, the transaction halts, no charge is applied, and no simulated result is ever substituted. A selection service that quietly falls back to a random number generator would be a different product. We do not operate that product.

The commitment architecture

Every parameter of a selection is fixed and published before the processor is contacted. The commitment digest is served from two places:

DNS. The proof zone eigenselect.eu exists solely to serve commitment records. It has no website. It is delegated to two authoritative nameservers we operate ourselves, one in Amsterdam and one in Warsaw, because publishing programmatic commitment records at this cadence is an application-layer use of DNS that managed providers do not offer. The zone is DNSSEC-signed, and the .eu registry publishes the DS record for its key, so a validating resolver checks every record's signature back to the root; the verification page shows the queries.

Nostr. The same records are published as signed, non-replaceable events to public relays operated by third parties, providing an evidence channel that does not depend on our infrastructure at all.

The commercial domain and the proof domain are held at different registrars, on different DNS providers, with no shared nameserver, so a failure of one cannot touch the other. The full cost accounting of this architecture is published on the transparency page, to the cent.

What we claim, and what we do not

EigenSelect does not claim to produce better randomness than classical alternatives, and it is not a trust layer, an oracle network, or a certification authority. It claims, precisely, that a physical quantum processor resolved your selection, and that the documented evidence chain lets anyone check what was committed and what was measured. The boundaries of that claim, including the parts that ultimately rest on trusting the hardware provider, are enumerated item by item on the verification page and restated in every report's technical appendix.

Operational parameters

Backend	QPU‑EMERALD‑54PQ (IQM Crystal‑54), superconducting
Shots per execution	1
Out-of-domain policy	Document and re-execute the identical circuit; max 42 attempts; retries at our expense
Simulation fallback	Prohibited. Fails closed, with a full refund
Commitment channels	DNS TXT (eigenselect.eu, self-hosted authoritative, DNSSEC) + Nostr (public relays)
Deliverable	Designed PDF report; commitment records remain publicly queryable
Price	€50 per resolved pick, VAT included