Communications of the ACM
Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem
Urmila Mahadev presented her protocol at the 59th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.
Credit: Quanta Magazine
In the spring of 2017, Urmila Mahadev had just solved a major problem in quantum computation, the study of computers that derive their power from the strange laws of quantum physics. Mahadev's new result, on what is called blind computation, made it "clear she was a rising star," said Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin.
But Mahadev had a different research problem in her sights, one that Aaronson called "one of the most basic questions you can ask in quantum computation." Namely: If you ask a quantum computer to perform a computation for you, how can you know whether it has really followed your instructions, or even done anything quantum at all?
This question may soon be far from academic. Before too many years have elapsed, researchers hope, quantum computers may be able to offer exponential speedups on a host of problems, from modeling the behavior around a black hole to simulating how a large protein folds up.
But once a quantum computer can perform computations a classical computer can't, how will we know if it has done them correctly? Computer scientists have long wondered whether it is possible for a quantum computer to provide any ironclad guarantee that it really has done what it claimed.
From Quanta Magazine
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