Quantum computing: too much to handle!

Tomorrow I’m headed to Berkeley for the Inkhaven blogging residency, whose participants need to write one blog post per day or get kicked out. I’ll be there to share my “wisdom” as a distinguished elder blogger (note that Shtetl-Optimized is now in its twentieth year). I’m acutely aware of the irony, that I myself can barely muster the willpower these days to put up a post every other week.

And it’s not as if nothing is happening in this blog’s traditional stomping-ground of quantum computing! In fact, the issue is just the opposite: way too much is happening for me to do it any sort of justice. Who do people think I am, Zvi Mowshowitz? The mere thought of being comprehensive, of responsibly staying on top of all the latest QC developments, makes me want to curl up in bed, and either scroll through political Substacks or take a nap.

But then, you know, eventually a post gets written. Let me give you some vignettes about what’s new in QC, any one of which could easily have been its own post if I were twenty years younger.

(1) Google announced verifiable quantum advantage based on Out-of-Time-Order-Correlators (OTOC)—this is actually from back in June, but it’s gotten more and more attention as Google has explained it more thoroughly. See especially this recent 2-page note by King, Kothari, et al., explaining Google’s experiment in theoretical computer science language. Basically, what they do is, starting from the all-|0⟩ state, to apply a random circuit C, then a single gate g, then C-1, then another gate h, then C again, then g again, then C-1, and then measure a qubit. If C is shallow, then the qubit is likely to still be |0⟩. If C is too deep, then the qubit is likely to be in the maximally mixed state, totally uncorrelated with its initial state—the gates g and h having caused a “butterfly effect” that completely ruined all the cancellation between C and C-1. Google claims that, empirically, there’s an intermediate regime where the qubit is neither |0⟩ nor the maximally mixed state, but a third thing—and that this third thing seems hard to determine classically, using tensor network algorithms or anything else they’ve thrown at it, but it can of course be determined by running the quantum computer. Crucially, because we’re just trying to estimate a few parameters here, rather than sample from a probability distribution (as with previous quantum supremacy experiments), the output can be checked by comparing it against the output of a second quantum computer, even though the problem still isn’t in NP. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why they go back and forth between C and C-1 multiple times rather than just once, it’s to be extra confident that there’s not a fast classical simulation. Of course there might turn out to be a fast classical simulation anyway, but if so, it will require a new idea: gauntlet thrown.

(2) Quantinuum, the trapped-ion QC startup in Colorado, announced its Helios processor. Quick summary of the specs: 98 qubits, all-to-all 2-qubit gates with 99.92% fidelity, the ability to choose which gates to apply “just in time” (rather than fixing the whole circuit in advance, as was needed with their previous API), and an “X”-shaped junction for routing qubits one way or the other (the sort of thing that a scalable trapped-ion quantum computer will need many of). This will enable, and is already enabling, more and better demonstrations of quantum advantage.

(3) Quantinuum and JP Morgan Chase announced the demonstration of a substantially improved version of my and Shih-Han-Hung’s protocol for generating cryptographically certified random bits, using quantum supremacy experiments based on random circuit sampling. They did their demo on Quantinuum’s new Helios processor. Compared to the previous demonstration, the new innovation is to send the circuit to the quantum computer one layer at a time, rather than all at once (something that, again, Quantinuum’s new API allows). The idea is that a cheating server, who wanted to spoof the randomness deterministically, now has much less time: using the most competitive known methods (e.g., those based on tensor network contraction), it seems the cheater would need to swing into action only after learning the final layer of gates, so would now have mere milliseconds to spoof rather than seconds, making Internet latency the dominant source of spoofing time in practice. While a complexity-theoretic analysis of the new protocol (or, in general, of “layer-by-layer” quantum supremacy protocols like it) is still lacking, I like the idea a lot.

(4) The startup company BlueQubit announced a candidate demonstration of verifiable quantum supremacy via obfuscated peaked random circuits, again on a Quantinuum trapped-ion processor (though not Helios). In so doing, BlueQubit is following the program that Yuxuan Zhang and I laid out last year: namely, generate a quantum circuit C that hopefully looks random to any efficient classical algorithm, but that conceals a secret high-probability output string x, which pops out if you run C on a quantum computer on the all-0 initial state. To try to hide x, BlueQubit uses at least three different circuit obfuscation techniques, which already tells you that they can’t have complete confidence in any one of them (since if they did, why the other two?). Nevertheless, I’m satisfied that they tried hard to break their own obfuscation, and failed. Now it’s other people’s turn to try.

(5) Deshpande, Fefferman, et al. announced a different theoretical proposal for quantum advantage from peaked quantum circuits, based on error-correcting codes. This seems tempting to try to demonstrate along the way to quantum fault-tolerance.

(6) A big one: John Bostanci, Jonas Haferkamp, Chinmay Nirkhe, and Mark Zhandry announced a proof of a classical oracle separation between the complexity classes QMA and QCMA, something that they’ve been working on for well over a year. Their candidate problem is basically a QMA-ified version of my Forrelation, which Raz and Tal previously used to achieve an oracle separation between BQP and PH. I caution that their paper is 91 pages long and hasn’t yet been vetted by independent experts, and there have been serious failed attempts on this exact problem in this past. If this stands, however, it finally settles a problem that’s been open since 2002 (and which I’ve worked on at various points starting in 2002), and shows a strong sense in which quantum proofs are more powerful than classical proofs. Note that in 2006, Greg Kuperberg and I gave a quantum oracle separation between QMA and QCMA—introducing the concept of quantum oracles for the specific purpose of that result—and since then, there’s been progress on making the oracle steadily “more classical,” but the oracle was always still randomized or “in-place” or had restrictions on how it could be queried.

(7) Oxford Ionics (which is now owned by IonQ) announced a 2-qubit gate with 99.99% fidelity: a record, and significantly past the threshold for quantum fault-tolerance. However, as far as I know, it remains to demonstrate this sort of fidelity in a large programmable system with dozens of qubits and hundreds of gates.

(8) Semi-announcement: Quanta reports that “Physicists Take the Imaginary Numbers Out of Quantum Mechanics,” and this seems to have gone viral on my social media. The article misses the opportunity to explain that “taking the imaginary numbers out” is as trivial as choosing to call each complex amplitude “just an ordered pair of reals, obeying such-and-such rules, which happen to mimic the rules for complex numbers.” Thus, the only interesting question here is whether one can take imaginary numbers out of QM in various more-or-less “natural” ways: a technical debate that the recent papers are pushing forward. For what it’s worth, I don’t expect that anything coming out of this line of work will ever be “natural” enough for me to stop explaining QM in terms of complex numbers in my undergraduate class, for example.

(9) The list of accepted talks for the annual QIP conference, to be held January 24-30 in Riga, Latvia, is now out. Lots of great stuff as always.

(10) There are probably other major recent developments in QC that I should’ve put into this post but forgot about. You can remind me about them in the comments.

To summarize the most important developments:

Evidence continues to pile up that we are not living in the universe of Gil Kalai and the other quantum computing skeptics. Indeed, given the current staggering rate of hardware progress, I now think it’s a live possibility that we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next US presidential election. And I say that not only because of the possibility of the next US presidential election getting cancelled, or preempted by runaway superintelligence!
OK, but what will those quantum computers be useful for? Anyone who’s been reading this blog for the past 20 years, or any non-negligible fraction thereof, hopefully already has a calibrated sense of that, so I won’t belabor. But briefly: yes, our knowledge of useful quantum algorithms has slowly been expanding over the past thirty years. The central difficulty is that our knowledge of useful classical algorithms has also been expanding, and the only thing that matters is the differential between the two! I’d say that the two biggest known application areas for QC remain (a) quantum simulation and (b) the breaking of public-key cryptography, just as they were thirty years ago. In any case, none of the exciting developments that I’ve chosen to highlight in this post directly address “what is it good for?” question, with the exception of the certified randomness thing.
In talks over the past three years, I’ve advocated “verifiable quantum supremacy on current hardware” as perhaps the central challenge right now for quantum computing theory. (As I love to point out, we do know how to achieve any two of (a) quantum supremacy that’s (b) verifiable and (c) runs on current hardware!) So I’m gratified that three of the recent developments that I chose to highlight, namely (1), (4), and (5), directly address this challenge. Of course, we’re not yet sure whether any of these three attempts will stand—that is, whether they’ll resist all attempts to simulate them classically. But the more serious shots on goal we have (and all three of these are quite serious), the better the chances that at least one will stand! So I’m glad that people are sticking their necks out, proposing these things, and honestly communicating what they know and don’t know about them: this is exactly what I’d hoped would happen. Of course, complexity-theoretic analysis of these proposals would also be great, perhaps from people with more youth and/or energy than me. Now it’s time for me to sleep.