Applied Mathematics Colloquium: Dr. Yosi Rinott

Title: Statistical Aspects of Quantum Supremacy Demonstration

Abstract: the quantum supremacy  as  presented by Google's team a year ago, making much news, and potential demonstrations in the future, consists of demonstrating that a quantum circuit is capable of generating bitstrings  from a distribution (which is itself random) that is considered hard to simulate on classical computers. This is called a sampling task (which is impractical, that is, useless for now). Quantum computers perform such a task with a great deal of noise, and  efficient statistical analysis is needed in order is to verify that indeed the right distribution was sampled, and to estimate the noise level or fidelity.  Some interesting statistical questions arise, and some background on quantum computing must be given beforehand.