Hybrid quantum-classical algorithm matches best code solvers

Refat Ismail, Ashish Kakkar, and Anatoly Dymarsky of the University of Kentucky have devised a new method to assess the quality of quantum error-correcting codes, a critical component for building practical quantum computers. The researchers tackled the notoriously difficult, NP-hard problem of determining a code’s minimum distance, a measure of its ability to preserve quantum information, by reformulating it as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem. Their approach, tested with the D-Wave Advantage 4.1 quantum annealer and a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm called Qbsolv, achieved performance on par with the best available classical algorithms solving QUBO. Here we propose to harness the power of contemporary quantum platforms to address this question, and in this way help design…