How Many Shots Does a Quantum Reservoir Need? Measurement Cost and Its Scaling in Buffered Quantum Reservoir Computing

arXiv:2611.08632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) inherits from classical reservoir computing the property that only a linear readout is trained, but unlike a classical reservoir its state is never directly observable: every feature is an expectation value estimated from a finite number of measurement shots. The shot budget is therefore a first-class hyperparameter with no classical analogue. Its effect on QRC has recently begun to be studied; what remains unsettled is how a required budget should be defined, and whether competing definitions agree. This paper argues that they do not, and that the disagreement is systematic rather than incidental.