No Arabic abstract
Quantum computing is of high interest because it promises to perform at least some kinds of computations much faster than classical computers. Arute et al. 2019 (informally, the Google Quantum Team) report the results of experiments that purport to demonstrate quantum supremacy -- the claim that the performance of some quantum computers is better than that of classical computers on some problems. Do these results close the debate over quantum supremacy? We argue that they do not. We provide an overview of the Google Quantum Teams experiments, then identify some open questions in the quest to demonstrate quantum supremacy.
Motivated by the recent experimental demonstrations of quantum supremacy, proving the hardness of the output of random quantum circuits is an imperative near term goal. We prove under the complexity theoretical assumption of the non-collapse of the polynomial hierarchy that approximating the output probabilities of random quantum circuits to within $exp(-Omega(mlog m))$ additive error is hard for any classical computer, where $m$ is the number of gates in the quantum computation. More precisely, we show that the above problem is $#mathsf{P}$-hard under $mathsf{BPP}^{mathsf{NP}}$ reduction. In the recent experiments, the quantum circuit has $n$-qubits and the architecture is a two-dimensional grid of size $sqrt{n}timessqrt{n}$. Indeed for constant depth circuits approximating the output probabilities to within $2^{-Omega(nlog{n})}$ is hard. For circuits of depth $log{n}$ or $sqrt{n}$ for which the anti-concentration property holds, approximating the output probabilities to within $2^{-Omega(nlog^2{n})}$ and $2^{-Omega(n^{3/2}log n)}$ is hard respectively. We made an effort to find the best proofs and proved these results from first principles, which do not use the standard techniques such as the Berlekamp--Welch algorithm, the usual Paturis lemma, and Rakhmanovs result.
As Moores law reaches its limits, quantum computers are emerging with the promise of dramatically outperforming classical computers. We have witnessed the advent of quantum processors with over $50$ quantum bits (qubits), which are expected to be beyond the reach of classical simulation. Quantum supremacy is the event at which the old Extended Church-Turing Thesis is overturned: A quantum computer performs a task that is practically impossible for any classical (super)computer. The demonstration requires both a solid theoretical guarantee and an experimental realization. The lead candidate is Random Circuit Sampling (RCS), which is the task of sampling from the output distribution of random quantum circuits. Google recently announced a $53-$qubit experimental demonstration of RCS. Soon after, classical algorithms appeared that challenge the supremacy of random circuits by estimating their outputs. How hard is it to classically simulate the output of random quantum circuits? We prove that estimating the output probabilities of random quantum circuits is formidably hard ($#P$-Hard) for any classical computer. This makes RCS the strongest candidate for demonstrating quantum supremacy relative to all other proposals. The robustness to the estimation error that we prove may serve as a new hardness criterion for the performance of classical algorithms. To achieve this, we introduce the Cayley path interpolation between any two gates of a quantum computation and convolve recent advances in quantum complexity and information with probability and random matrices. Furthermore, we apply algebraic geometry to generalize the well-known Berlekamp-Welch algorithm that is widely used in coding theory and cryptography. Our results imply that there is an exponential hardness barrier for the classical simulation of most quantum circuits.
Quantum circuit simulators have a long tradition of exploiting massive hardware parallelism. Most of the times, parallelism has been supported by special purpose libraries tailored specifically for the quantum circuits. Quantum circuit simulators are integral part of quantum software stacks, which are mostly written in Python. Our focus has been on ease of use, implementation and maintainability within the Python ecosystem. We report the performance gains we obtained by using CuPy, a general purpose library (linear algebra) developed specifically for CUDA-based GPUs, to simulate quantum circuits. For supremacy circuits the speedup is around 2x, and for quantum multipliers almost 22x compared to state-of-the-art C++-based simulators.
It is believed that random quantum circuits are difficult to simulate classically. These have been used to demonstrate quantum supremacy: the execution of a computational task on a quantum computer that is infeasible for any classical computer. The task underlying the assertion of quantum supremacy by Arute et al. (Nature, 574, 505--510 (2019)) was initially estimated to require Summit, the worlds most powerful supercomputer today, approximately 10,000 years. The same task was performed on the Sycamore quantum processor in only 200 seconds. In this work, we present a tensor network-based classical simulation algorithm. Using a Summit-comparable cluster, we estimate that our simulator can perform this task in less than 20 days. On moderately-sized instances, we reduce the runtime from years to minutes, running several times faster than Sycamore itself. These estimates are based on explicit simulations of parallel subtasks, and leave no room for hidden costs. The simulators key ingredient is identifying and optimizing the stem of the computation: a sequence of pairwise tensor contractions that dominates the computational cost. This orders-of-magnitude reduction in classical simulation time, together with proposals for further significant improvements, indicates that achieving quantum supremacy may require a period of continuing quantum hardware developments without an unequivocal first demonstration.
Loading data in a quantum device is required in several quantum computing applications. Without an efficient loading procedure, the cost to initialize the algorithms can dominate the overall computational cost. A circuit-based quantum random access memory named FF-QRAM can load M n-bit patterns with computational cost O(CMn) to load continuous data where C depends on the data distribution. In this work, we propose a strategy to load continuous data without post-selection with computational cost O(Mn). The proposed method is based on the probabilistic quantum memory, a strategy to load binary data in quantum devices, and the FF-QRAM using standard quantum gates, and is suitable for noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers.