Classical Simulation of Quantum Circuits Using Reinforcement Learning: Parallel Environments and Benchmark Xiao-Y ang Liu

Google's "quantum supremacy" announcement [3] has received broad questions from academia and industry due to the debatable estimate of 10, 000 years' running time for the classical simulation task on the Summit supercomputer. Has "quantum supremacy" already come? Or will it come in one or two decades later? To avoid hasty advertisements of "quantum supremacy" by tech giants or quantum startups and eliminate the cost of dedicating a team to the classical simulation task, we advocate an open-source approach to maintain a trustable benchmark performance. In this paper, we take a reinforcement learning approach for the classical simulation of quantum circuits and demonstrate its great potential by reporting an estimated simulation time of less than 4 days, a speedup of 5 .40