MIT and Google Design System to Verify Accuracy of Complex Quantum Computing Operations
How to verify that quantum chips are computing correctly
Selected notes ~
+ Full-scale quantum computers will require millions of qubits, which isn’t yet feasible. In the past few years, researchers have started developing “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” (NISQ) chips, which contain around 50 to 100 qubits. That’s just enough to demonstrate “quantum advantage,” meaning the NISQ chip can solve certain algorithms that are intractable for classical computers. Verifying that the chips performed operations as expected, however, can be very inefficient. The chip’s outputs can look entirely random, so it takes a long time to simulate steps to determine if everything went according to plan.
“The very same properties which give these chips quantum computational power makes them nearly impossible to verify,” Carolan says.
+ The researchers’ work essentially traces an output quantum state generated by the quantum circuit back to a known input state. Doing so reveals which circuit operations were performed on the input to produce the output. Those operations should always match what researchers programmed. If not, the researchers can use the information to pinpoint where things went wrong on the chip.
+ At the core of the new protocol, called “Variational Quantum Unsampling,” lies a “divide and conquer” approach, Carolan says, that breaks the output quantum state into chunks. “Instead of doing the whole thing in one shot, which takes a very long time, we do this unscrambling layer by layer. This allows us to break the problem up to tackle it in a more efficient way,” Carolan says.
+ “This is an excellent paper that employs a nonlinear quantum neural network to learn the unknown unitary operation performed by a black box,” says Stefano Pirandola, a professor of computer science who specializes in quantum technologies at the University of York. “It is clear that this scheme could be very useful to verify the actual gates that are performed by a quantum circuit — [for example] by a NISQ processor. From this point of view, the scheme serves as an important benchmarking tool for future quantum engineers. The idea was remarkably implemented on a photonic quantum chip.”
Source: MIT News. Rob Matheson, How to verify that quantum chips are computing correctly…
Content may have been edited for style and clarity.