Abstract
Quantum computers are on the verge of becoming a commercially available reality. They represent a paradigm shift in computing, with a steep learning gradient. The creation of games is a way to ease the transition for beginners. We present a game similar to the Poker variant Texas hold ’em with the intention to serve as an engaging pedagogical tool to learn the basics rules of quantum computing. The concepts of quantum states, quantum operations and measurement can be learned in a playful manner. The difference to the classical variant is that the community cards are replaced by a quantum register that is “randomly” initialized, and the cards for each player are replaced by quantum gates, randomly drawn from a set of available gates. Each player can create a quantum circuit with their cards, with the aim to maximize the number of 1’s that are measured in the computational basis. The basic concepts of superposition, entanglement and quantum gates are employed. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation using Qiskit (Aleksandrowicz et al. in An open-source framework for quantum computing, 2019). A comparison of the results for the created circuits using a simulator and IBM machines is conducted, showing that error rates on contemporary quantum computers are still very high. For the success of noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers, improvements on the error rates and error mitigation techniques are necessary, even for simple circuits. We show that quantum error mitigation (QEM) techniques can be used to improve expectation values of observables on real quantum devices.
Highlights
We show that errors can successfully be mitigated when one is interested in expectation values of an observable
The approach corresponds to repeating the same quantum evolution many times with known variations on the underlying systems’ error properties. They show that the effective spontaneous emission, T1, and dephasing, T2, times can be increased using their method in both simulation and experiments on an actual quantum computer
We have presented a game intended to serve as a pedagogical tool for learning the basic rules of quantum computers
Summary
J. Plus (2020) 135:353 to utilize the potential power of quantum computers, one has to formulate a given problem in a form that is suitable for a quantum computer (encoding step) and develop specialized algorithms. The design of games that make use of the underlying rules of quantum computers is a way to attract more interest and ease the transition from classical algorithms to quantum algorithms for beginners. 3. Since one of the best ways to learn is through play, this game can help to attract more people—from elementary school to post-graduate level at the university—to the field of quantum computing and we hope that the game awakens curiosity for present challenges in the field, such as the design of quantum algorithms and error mitigation schemes. Quantum error mitigation (QEM), on the other hand, can be achieved with additional classical resources only and is applicable to NISQ devices.
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