QAOA for Max-Cut requires hundreds of qubits for quantum speed-up
Abstract
Computational quantum technologies are entering a new phase in which noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers are available, but are still too small to benefit from active error correction. Even with a finite coherence budget to invest in quantum information processing, noisy devices with about 50 qubits are expected to experimentally demonstrate quantum supremacy in the next few years. Defined in terms of artificial tasks, current proposals for quantum supremacy, even if successful, will not help to facilitate solutions to practical problems. In contrast, we believe that future users of quantum computers are interested in actual applications and that noisy quantum devices may still provide value by approximately solving hard combinatorial problems via hybrid classical-quantum algorithms. To lower bound the size of quantum computers with practical utility, we perform realistic simulations of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm and conclude that quantum speedup will not be attainable, at least for a representative combinatorial problem, until several hundreds of qubits are available.
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Scientific User Facilities Division
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1527339
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 9; Journal Issue: 1; Journal ID: ISSN 2045-2322
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Citation Formats
Guerreschi, Gian Giacomo, and Matsuura, A. Y. QAOA for Max-Cut requires hundreds of qubits for quantum speed-up. United States: N. p., 2019.
Web. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-43176-9.
Guerreschi, Gian Giacomo, & Matsuura, A. Y. QAOA for Max-Cut requires hundreds of qubits for quantum speed-up. United States. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43176-9
Guerreschi, Gian Giacomo, and Matsuura, A. Y. Mon .
"QAOA for Max-Cut requires hundreds of qubits for quantum speed-up". United States. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43176-9. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1527339.
@article{osti_1527339,
title = {QAOA for Max-Cut requires hundreds of qubits for quantum speed-up},
author = {Guerreschi, Gian Giacomo and Matsuura, A. Y.},
abstractNote = {Computational quantum technologies are entering a new phase in which noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers are available, but are still too small to benefit from active error correction. Even with a finite coherence budget to invest in quantum information processing, noisy devices with about 50 qubits are expected to experimentally demonstrate quantum supremacy in the next few years. Defined in terms of artificial tasks, current proposals for quantum supremacy, even if successful, will not help to facilitate solutions to practical problems. In contrast, we believe that future users of quantum computers are interested in actual applications and that noisy quantum devices may still provide value by approximately solving hard combinatorial problems via hybrid classical-quantum algorithms. To lower bound the size of quantum computers with practical utility, we perform realistic simulations of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm and conclude that quantum speedup will not be attainable, at least for a representative combinatorial problem, until several hundreds of qubits are available.},
doi = {10.1038/s41598-019-43176-9},
journal = {Scientific Reports},
number = 1,
volume = 9,
place = {United States},
year = {2019},
month = {5}
}
Free Publicly Available Full Text
Publisher's Version of Record
Other availability
Search WorldCat to find libraries that may hold this journal
Cited by: 10 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science
Web of Science
Figures / Tables:
Figure 1: Schematic diagram of the QAOA algorithm and auxiliary tasks to solve a single Max-Cut instance. The two branches, labelled “simulation” and “experiment” respectively, distinguish between the operations to simulate the variational algorithm with classical computers and those to perform it experimentally with quantum devices. In our study, 10000more »
All figures and tables
(2 total)
Save to My Library
You must Sign In or Create an Account in order to save documents to your library.
Works referenced in this record:
Compiling quantum circuits to realistic hardware architectures using temporal planners
journal, February 2018
- Venturelli, Davide; Do, Minh; Rieffel, Eleanor
- Quantum Science and Technology, Vol. 3, Issue 2
Max 2-SAT with up to 108 qubits
journal, April 2014
- Santra, Siddhartha; Quiroz, Gregory; Ver Steeg, Greg
- New Journal of Physics, Vol. 16, Issue 4
Characterizing quantum supremacy in near-term devices
journal, April 2018
- Boixo, Sergio; Isakov, Sergei V.; Smelyanskiy, Vadim N.
- Nature Physics, Vol. 14, Issue 6
Restless Tuneup of High-Fidelity Qubit Gates
journal, April 2017
- Rol, M. A.; Bultink, C. C.; O’Brien, T. E.
- Physical Review Applied, Vol. 7, Issue 4
0-1 Quadratic programming approach for optimum solutions of two scheduling problems
journal, February 1994
- Alidaee, Bahram; Kochenberger, Gary A.; Ahmadian, Ahmad
- International Journal of Systems Science, Vol. 25, Issue 2
Evidence for quantum annealing with more than one hundred qubits
journal, February 2014
- Boixo, Sergio; Rønnow, Troels F.; Isakov, Sergei V.
- Nature Physics, Vol. 10, Issue 3
From the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm to a Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz
journal, February 2019
- Hadfield, Stuart; Wang, Zhihui; O'Gorman, Bryan
- Algorithms, Vol. 12, Issue 2
Error Sensitivity to Environmental Noise in Quantum Circuits for Chemical State Preparation
journal, June 2016
- Sawaya, Nicolas P. D.; Smelyanskiy, Mikhail; McClean, Jarrod R.
- Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, Vol. 12, Issue 7
Superconducting quantum circuits at the surface code threshold for fault tolerance
journal, April 2014
- Barends, R.; Kelly, J.; Megrant, A.
- Nature, Vol. 508, Issue 7497
Two-step approach to scheduling quantum circuits
journal, July 2018
- Guerreschi, Gian Giacomo; Park, Jongsoo
- Quantum Science and Technology, Vol. 3, Issue 4
Improved approximation algorithms for maximum cut and satisfiability problems using semidefinite programming
journal, November 1995
- Goemans, Michel X.; Williamson, David P.
- Journal of the ACM, Vol. 42, Issue 6
Combinatorial 5/6-approximation of Max Cut in graphs of maximum degree 3
journal, September 2008
- Bazgan, Cristina; Tuza, Zsolt
- Journal of Discrete Algorithms, Vol. 6, Issue 3
MAX CUT in cubic graphs
journal, November 2004
- Halperin, Eran; Livnat, Dror; Zwick, Uri
- Journal of Algorithms, Vol. 53, Issue 2
Applications of cut polyhedra — I
journal, November 1994
- Deza, Michel; Laurent, Monique
- Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 55, Issue 2
Quantum Mechanics Helps in Searching for a Needle in a Haystack
journal, July 1997
- Grover, Lov K.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 79, Issue 2
Noise gates for decoherent quantum circuits
journal, March 2008
- Bassi, Angelo; Deckert, Dirk-André
- Physical Review A, Vol. 77, Issue 3
Strategies for quantum computing molecular energies using the unitary coupled cluster ansatz
journal, October 2018
- Romero, Jonathan; Babbush, Ryan; McClean, Jarrod R.
- Quantum Science and Technology, Vol. 4, Issue 1
Hardware-efficient variational quantum eigensolver for small molecules and quantum magnets
journal, September 2017
- Kandala, Abhinav; Mezzacapo, Antonio; Temme, Kristan
- Nature, Vol. 549, Issue 7671
Superconducting Circuits for Quantum Information: An Outlook
journal, March 2013
- Devoret, M. H.; Schoelkopf, R. J.
- Science, Vol. 339, Issue 6124
Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer
journal, January 1999
- Shor, Peter W.
- SIAM Review, Vol. 41, Issue 2
Quantum approximate optimization algorithm for MaxCut: A fermionic view
journal, February 2018
- Wang, Zhihui; Hadfield, Stuart; Jiang, Zhang
- Physical Review A, Vol. 97, Issue 2
A blueprint for demonstrating quantum supremacy with superconducting qubits
journal, April 2018
- Neill, C.; Roushan, P.; Kechedzhi, K.
- Science, Vol. 360, Issue 6385
Scalable Quantum Simulation of Molecular Energies
journal, July 2016
- O’Malley, P. J. J.; Babbush, R.; Kivlichan, I. D.
- Physical Review X, Vol. 6, Issue 3
Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer
journal, October 1997
- Shor, Peter W.
- SIAM Journal on Computing, Vol. 26, Issue 5
Scalable Quantum Simulation of Molecular Energies
text, January 2015
- O'Malley, P. J. J.; Babbush, R.; Kivlichan, I. D.
- arXiv
Error Sensitivity to Environmental Noise in Quantum Circuits for Chemical State Preparation
preprint, January 2016
- Sawaya, Nicolas P. D.; Smelyanskiy, Mikhail; McClean, Jarrod R.
- arXiv
Characterizing Quantum Supremacy in Near-Term Devices
text, January 2016
- Boixo, Sergio; Isakov, Sergei V.; Smelyanskiy, Vadim N.
- arXiv
Restless Tuneup of High-Fidelity Qubit Gates
text, January 2016
- Rol, M. A.; Bultink, C. C.; O'Brien, T. E.
- arXiv
Strategies for quantum computing molecular energies using the unitary coupled cluster ansatz
preprint, January 2017
- Romero, Jonathan; Babbush, Ryan; McClean, Jarrod R.
- arXiv
Compiling quantum circuits to realistic hardware architectures using temporal planners
text, January 2017
- Venturelli, Davide; Do, Minh; Rieffel, Eleanor
- arXiv
Two-step approach to scheduling quantum circuits
text, January 2017
- Guerreschi, Gian Giacomo; Park, Jongsoo
- arXiv
A blueprint for demonstrating quantum supremacy with superconducting qubits
text, January 2017
- Neill, C.; Roushan, P.; Kechedzhi, K.
- arXiv
Works referencing / citing this record:
Parameterized quantum circuits as machine learning models
journal, October 2019
- Benedetti, Marcello; Lloyd, Erika; Sack, Stefan
- Quantum Science and Technology, Vol. 4, Issue 4
Methods for classically simulating noisy networked quantum architectures
journal, November 2019
- Vankov, Iskren; Mills, Daniel; Wallden, Petros
- Quantum Science and Technology, Vol. 5, Issue 1
Benchmarking the quantum approximate optimization algorithm
text, January 2020
- Willsch, Madita; Willsch, Dennis; Jin, Fengping
- RWTH Aachen University
Benchmarking the quantum approximate optimization algorithm
journal, June 2020
- Willsch, Madita; Willsch, Dennis; Jin, Fengping
- Quantum Information Processing, Vol. 19, Issue 7
Methods for Classically Simulating Noisy Networked Quantum Architectures
text, January 2018
- Vankov, Iskren; Mills, Daniel; Wallden, Petros
- arXiv
Parameterized quantum circuits as machine learning models
text, January 2019
- Benedetti, Marcello; Lloyd, Erika; Sack, Stefan
- arXiv
Figures/Tables have been extracted from DOE-funded journal article accepted manuscripts.