Learning based hardware-centric quantum circuit generation

Abstract

Large fault­tolerant universal gate quantum computers will provide a major speed­up to a variety of common computational problems. While such computers are years away, we currently have noisy intermediate­scale quantum (NISQ) computers at our disposal. In this project we present two quantum machine learning approaches that can be used to find quantum circuits suitable for specific NISQ devices. We present one gradient­based and one non­gradient based machine learning approach to optimize the created quantum circuits, to best mimic the behaviour of a given function up to measurement. We make sure that the created quantum circuits obey the restrictions of the chosen hardware, therefore the approaches can be used to find circuits perfectly suited for specific NISQ devices. This enables the user to make the best use of quantum technology in the near future. In doing this we created our own quantum simulator which can be used to simulate small quantum circuits that obey hardware restrictions. We also present the method used to implement this simulator. Finally we present the results of applying both machine learning approaches to different problem types and compare their performance.