Did Devs come true?
The machine at the centre of Devs, a quantum computer that can watch any moment in history, is not coming, and may be ruled out by physics. The world around the machine is already here: quantum hardware beating supercomputers on narrow tasks, models that predict human choices, and frontier labs run under heavy secrecy by founders their staff treat as prophets.
Read the review · 6.4/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story: 5 is the core premise, 1 is background detail. Arrived scores 1, arriving 0.5, everything else 0. P(n) is the weighted points divided by the total weight.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status | Value | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DEVS-1 | Quantum computers solve problems that no classical computer can solve in practice. Supporting: Amaya's quantum hardware is the means to the machine, not the story itself. |
3 | ARRIVING | 0.5 | 1.5 |
| DEVS-2 | A computer reconstructs and replays any past or future event by calculating it from the present state of matter. Core premise: the machine that replays past and future is what Devs is. |
5 | FAR | 0 | 0 |
| DEVS-3 | Software predicts individual human choices more accurately than our best theories of human behaviour. Texture: the narrow version of the machine's power; the story runs on full determinism, not behaviour models. |
2 | ARRIVING | 0.5 | 1 |
| DEVS-4 | Staff at frontier technology labs are bound by sweeping secrecy agreements that stop them speaking about what they build. Supporting: the secret division and its enforcers drive the thriller opening and Sergei's death. |
3 | ARRIVED | 1 | 3 |
| Total | 13 | 5.5 |
P(n) = 5.5 ÷ 13 = 42% · unweighted average 50%
-
DEVS-1
Quantum computers solve problems that no classical computer can solve in practice.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: Amaya's quantum hardware is the means to the machine, not the story itself.
Google's Willow chip ran a benchmark in under five minutes that Google says would take a top supercomputer around 10^25 years, and it showed error correction improving as qubits were added. Those benchmarks are built to favour quantum hardware and have no practical use. Earlier supremacy claims were disputed by rivals. A useful problem solved beyond classical reach is the threshold still to cross. 123
-
DEVS-2
A computer reconstructs and replays any past or future event by calculating it from the present state of matter.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: the machine that replays past and future is what Devs is.
This is Laplace's demon with a screen, and it may be impossible in principle, not merely hard. Quantum mechanics forbids copying an unknown quantum state, so the exact present state cannot be read out in full. Whether the universe is deterministic at all is an open question in physics and philosophy. The date range here is a formality. The honest answer may be never. 45
-
DEVS-3
Software predicts individual human choices more accurately than our best theories of human behaviour.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: the narrow version of the machine's power; the story runs on full determinism, not behaviour models.
Centaur, a language model fine-tuned on more than ten million choices from 160 psychology experiments, predicted held-out participants' behaviour better than established cognitive models. That is a lab result about lab tasks. Prediction in the wild is much worse, as predictive policing tools have shown. 67
-
DEVS-4
Staff at frontier technology labs are bound by sweeping secrecy agreements that stop them speaking about what they build.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: the secret division and its enforcers drive the thriller opening and Sergei's death.
In 2024 leaked documents showed OpenAI tying former employees' vested equity to non-disparagement agreements, and current and former staff at leading AI labs published a letter asking for a right to warn the public about risks. Sam Altman apologised and said OpenAI had never clawed back vested equity and would not. The secrecy is real, and it is now being contested in public. 89
- FOR Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip. Google, 2024-12-09. Claims a random circuit sampling run in under five minutes that would take a leading supercomputer about 10 septillion years.
- FOR Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold. Nature, 2024-12-09. Logical error rates fall as the surface code grows, the precondition for scaling.
- AGAINST On "quantum supremacy". IBM, 2019-10-22. IBM argued Google's 2019 supremacy task could be simulated classically in about 2.5 days, not 10,000 years.
- AGAINST A single quantum cannot be cloned. Nature, 1982-10. Wootters and Zurek's no-cloning theorem: the linearity of quantum mechanics forbids copying an unknown quantum state.
- CONTEXT Causal Determinism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003-01-23. Surveys whether physics supports determinism, including Laplace's demon and quantum mechanics.
- FOR A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition. Nature, 2025-07-02. Centaur, trained on Psych-101 (60,000+ participants, 10 million+ choices), beats existing cognitive models at predicting held-out behaviour.
- AGAINST Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes. The Markup, 2023-10-02. A crime-prediction product sold to a New Jersey police department was right less than 1% of the time.
- FOR OpenAI NDAs: Leaked documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees. Vox, 2024-05-22. Documents show departing staff pressured to sign non-disparagement terms or risk vested equity.
- FOR A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence. righttowarn.ai, 2024-06-04. Current and former OpenAI and Google DeepMind staff ask labs to stop enforcing non-disparagement agreements over risk concerns.
Ledger updated 1 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method