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Glossary

Every technical term this platform uses, with what it means and — the part that is harder to find elsewhere — the mistake it prevents. On this subject the intuitive reading is often the wrong one, so each entry says what a reader would otherwise get wrong.

Measurement

Expectation value

The average of a measurement over many shots, rather than any single outcome.

Easy to get wrong: Two very different states can share an expectation value. A Bell pair and two independent coin flips give identical single-qubit averages and differ only in their correlations.

Seen in use on /workbench