Quantum computers are on the verge of becoming a commercially available reality. They represent a paradigm shift in computing, with a steep learning gradient. The creation of games is a way to ease the transition for beginners. We present a game simi
lar to the Poker variant Texas hold em with the intention to serve as an engaging pedagogical tool to learn the basics rules of quantum computing. The concepts of quantum states, quantum operations and measurement can be learned in a playful manner. The difference to the classical variant is that the community cards are replaced by a quantum register that is randomly initialized, and the cards for each player are replaced by quantum gates, randomly drawn from a set of available gates. Each player can create a quantum circuit with their cards, with the aim to maximize the number of $1$s that are measured in the computational basis. The basic concepts of superposition, entanglement and quantum gates are employed. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation using Qiskit. A comparison of the results for the created circuits using a simulator and IBM machines is conducted, showing that error rates on contemporary quantum computers are still very high. For the success of noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers, improvements on the error rates and error mitigation techniques are necessary, even for simple circuits. We show that quantum error mitigation (QEM) techniques can be used to improve expectation values of observables on real quantum devices.
We reformulate the continuous space Schrodinger equation in terms of spin Hamiltonians. For the kinetic energy operator, the critical concept facilitating the reduction in model complexity is the idea of position encoding. Binary encoding of position
produces a Heisenberg-like model and yields exponential improvement in space complexity when compared to classical computing. Encoding with a binary reflected Gray code, and a Hamming distance 2 Gray code yields the additional effect of reducing the spin model down to the XZ and transverse Ising model respectively. We also identify the bijective mapping between diagonal unitaries and the Walsh series, producing the mapping of any real potential to a series of $k$-local Ising models through the fast Walsh transform. Finally, in a finite volume, we provide some numerical evidence to support the claim that the total time needed for adiabatic evolution is protected by the infrared cutoff of the system. As a result, initial state preparation from a free-field wavefunction to an interacting system is expected to exhibit polynomial time complexity with volume and constant scaling with respect to lattice discretization for all encodings. For the Hamming distance 2 Gray code, the evolution starts with the transverse Hamiltonian before introducing penalties such that the low lying spectrum reproduces the energy levels of the Laplacian. The adiabatic evolution of the penalty Hamiltonian is therefore sensitive to the ultraviolet scale. It is expected to exhibit polynomial time complexity with lattice discretization, or exponential time complexity with respect to the number of qubits given a fixed volume.
Quantum machine learning is one of the most promising applications of quantum computing in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum(NISQ) era. Here we propose a quantum convolutional neural network(QCNN) inspired by convolutional neural networks(CNN), wh
ich greatly reduces the computing complexity compared with its classical counterparts, with $O((log_{2}M)^6) $ basic gates and $O(m^2+e)$ variational parameters, where $M$ is the input data size, $m$ is the filter mask size and $e$ is the number of parameters in a Hamiltonian. Our model is robust to certain noise for image recognition tasks and the parameters are independent on the input sizes, making it friendly to near-term quantum devices. We demonstrate QCNN with two explicit examples. First, QCNN is applied to image processing and numerical simulation of three types of spatial filtering, image smoothing, sharpening, and edge detection are performed. Secondly, we demonstrate QCNN in recognizing image, namely, the recognition of handwritten numbers. Compared with previous work, this machine learning model can provide implementable quantum circuits that accurately corresponds to a specific classical convolutional kernel. It provides an efficient avenue to transform CNN to QCNN directly and opens up the prospect of exploiting quantum power to process information in the era of big data.
Variational Quantum Eigensolvers (VQEs) have recently attracted considerable attention. Yet, in practice, they still suffer from the efforts for estimating cost function gradients for large parameter sets or resource-demanding reinforcement strategie
s. Here, we therefore consider recent advances in weight-agnostic learning and propose a strategy that addresses the trade-off between finding appropriate circuit architectures and parameter tuning. We investigate the use of NEAT-inspired algorithms which evaluate circuits via genetic competition and thus circumvent issues due to exceeding numbers of parameters. Our methods are tested both via simulation and on real quantum hardware and are used to solve the transverse Ising Hamiltonian and the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin model.
Symmetry is a unifying concept in physics. In quantum information and beyond, it is known that quantum states possessing symmetry are not useful for certain information-processing tasks. For example, states that commute with a Hamiltonian realizing a
time evolution are not useful for timekeeping during that evolution, and bipartite states that are highly extendible are not strongly entangled and thus not useful for basic tasks like teleportation. Motivated by this perspective, this paper details several quantum algorithms that test the symmetry of quantum states and channels. For the case of testing Bose symmetry of a state, we show that there is a simple and efficient quantum algorithm, while the tests for other kinds of symmetry rely on the aid of a quantum prover. We prove that the acceptance probability of each algorithm is equal to the maximum symmetric fidelity of the state being tested, thus giving a firm operational meaning to these latter resource quantifiers. Special cases of the algorithms test for incoherence or separability of quantum states. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms by using the variational approach to quantum algorithms, replacing the quantum prover with a variational circuit. We also show that the maximum symmetric fidelities can be calculated by semi-definite programs, which is useful for benchmarking the performance of the quantum algorithms for sufficiently small examples. Finally, we establish various generalizations of the resource theory of asymmetry, with the upshot being that the acceptance probabilities of the algorithms are resource monotones and thus well motivated from the resource-theoretic perspective.