CQuIC Seminars
The question of quantum supremacy
Presented by Sergio Boixo
We present a theoretical foundation for a practical demonstration of quantum supremacy in near-term devices: the task of sampling bit-strings from the output of random quantum circuits, which can be thought of as the "hello world" program for quantum computers.
Arguably, this is the strongest theoretical proposal to prove an exponential separation between the computational power of classical and quantum computers. Determining where exactly the quantum supremacy frontier lies for sampling random quantum circuits has rapidly become an exciting area of research. On one hand, improvements in classical algorithms to simulate quantum circuits aim to increase the size of the quantum circuits required to establish quantum supremacy. This forces an experimental quantum device with a sufficiently large number of qubits and low enough error rates to implement circuits of sufficient depth (i.e the number of layers of gates in the circuit) to achieve supremacy. On the other hand, we now understand better how the particular choice of the quantum gates used to build random quantum circuits affects the simulation cost, leading to improved benchmarks for near-term quantum supremacy. We review multiple exaggerated claims against near-term quantum supremacy. Sampling from random quantum circuits is also an excellent calibration benchmark for quantum computers, which we call cross-entropy benchmarking.
3:30 pm, Thursday, June 7, 2018
PAIS-2540, PAIS
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