Grover's algorithm using the Sampler primitive

Background

Amplitude amplification is a general purpose quantum algorithm, or subroutine, that can be used to obtain a quadratic speedup over a handful of classical algorithms. Grover’s algorithm was the first to demonstrate this speedup on unstructured search problems. Formulating a Grover's search problem requires an oracle function that marks one or more computational basis states as the states we are interested in finding, and an amplification circuit that increases the amplitude of marked states, consequently suppressing the remaining states.

Here we demonstrate how to construct Grover oracles and make use of the GroverOperator from the Qiskit circuit library to easily setup a Grover's search instance. The runtime Sampler primitive allows for seamless execution of Grover circuits, including automatic compilation, error suppression, and readout error mitigation techniques.

Setup

Here we import the small number of tools we need for this tutorial.

Initialize Runtime service

Here we instantiate the Runtime service that gives access to the quantum devices and the simulator that we use in this tutorial. We will first use a simulator to validate our circuit, then execute it on a real quantum system.

Define a Grover experiment

Grover's algorithm requires an oracle that specifies one or more marked computational basis states, where "marked" means a state with a phase of -1. A controlled-Z gate, or its multi-controlled generalization over $N$ qubits, marks the $2^{N}-1$ state ('1'*$N$ bit-string). Marking basis states with one or more '0' in the binary representation requires applying X-gates on the corresponding qubits before and after the controlled-Z gate; equivalent to having an open-control on that qubit. In the following code, we define an oracle that does just that, marking one or more input basis states defined through their bit-string representation. The MCMT gate is used to implement the multi-controlled Z-gate.

Specific Grover's instance

Now that we have the oracle function, we can define a specific instance of Grover search. In this example we will mark two computational states out of the eight available in a three-qubit computational space:

Authenticate to run code cells Sign in

Reset Copy to clipboard

Output:

The GroverOperator

The built-in Qiskit GroverOperator takes an oracle circuit and returns a circuit that is composed of the oracle circuit itself and a circuit that amplifies the states marked by the oracle. Here, we decompose the circuit to see the gates within the operator:

Authenticate to run code cells Sign in

Reset Copy to clipboard

Output:

Repeated applications of this grover_op circuit amplify the marked states, making them the most probable bit-strings in the output distribution from the circuit. There is an optimal number of such applications that is determined by the ratio of marked states to total number of possible computational states:

Full Grover circuit

A complete Grover experiment starts with a Hadamard gate on each qubit; creating an even superposition of all computational basis states, followed the Grover operator (grover_op) repeated the optimal number of times. Here we make use of the QuantumCircuit.power(INT) method to repeatedly apply the Grover operator.

Authenticate to run code cells Sign in

Reset Copy to clipboard

Output:

Execution with the Sampler primitive

Amplitude amplification is a sampling problem that is suitable for execution with the Sampler runtime primitive. Because we have a single circuit, we instantiate a Sampler using the target backend. To begin, this is the simulator:

'ibmq_qasm_simulator'

Now we execute the circuit by using sim_sampler.run. The result is obtained in the returned quasi-probability distribution:

To see that the marked states are visible in the returned distribution, we convert the returned quasi-probability distribution from integer to bit-string representation to compare to the list of marked_states.

Authenticate to run code cells Sign in

Reset Copy to clipboard

Output:

Having verified that our code does indeed produce the desired outcome, we now execute it on a real device, creating an Sampler instance targeting that system:

'ibmq_lima'

Authenticate to run code cells Sign in

Reset Copy to clipboard

Output:

'0.11.3'

'0.25.0'