Exploiting Arbitrary Paths for the Simulation of Quantum Circuits with Decision Diagrams

Tensor Networks or Decision Diagrams? Guidelines for Classical Quantum Circuit Simulation

“…This problem has been intensively studied for tensor networks [14]- [18]. While not as extensive as for tensor networks, research towards this direction has also been conducted for decision diagrams [19]- [22]-in particular, for the use case of equivalence checking. Thus, in the following, we consider equivalence checking as the perfect use case for answering the question, whether the strategies for determining the order of computation are interchangeable between domains.…”

“…As a result, no clear runtime estimation can be derived for classical simulation based on decision diagrams. However, it has been shown in [22], that translating tensor network contraction plans to simulation paths for decision diagrams can allow for speedups of up to several orders of magnitude compared to the established simulation approach.…”

“…The efficiency of a simulation path for decision diagrams heavily depends on the amount of redundancy present in the underlying representations of intermediate results. While not as extensive as for tensor networks, it has been shown that choosing the right simulation path can make the difference between linear and exponential runtime as well as space [19]- [22]. The resulting strategies mainly achieve their efficiency from incorporating certain characteristics about the considered simulation task.…”

The basis of design tools for quantum computing

“…The MQT offers the classical quantum circuit simulator DDSIM that can be used to perform various quantum circuit simulation tasks based on using decision diagrams as a data structure. This includes strong and weak simulation [12,13,14], approximation techniques [15,16], noise-aware simulation [17,18,19], hybrid Schrödinger-Feynman techniques [20], support for dynamic circuits, the computation of expectation values [21], the simulation of mixeddimensional systems [22], and more [23,24,25,26]. Example 1.…”

“…Our overarching objective is to provide solutions for design tasks across the entire quantum software stack. This entails high-level support for end users in realizing their applications [6,7,8,9,10,11], efficient methods for the classical simulation [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26], compilation [11,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46], and verification [47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,…”