Page 33 - Australian Defence Magazine October 2021

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DEFENCE BUSINESS 33
SOLVING THE PROBLEM
One of the advantages of quantum computers is their abil- ity to solve optimisation problems, in this instance typified by the requirement to find the best pathway for UGVs, when there are perhaps multiple vehicles and multiple pathways to choose from, to reach their destination.
“Our approach was not to try to develop a new or better algorithm for executing Army’s problem on a quantum com- puter, but instead leverage all of our capabilities in quantum control to get the most from real hardware,” Biercuk said.
Biercuk says Q-CTRL took a three-staged approach to the problem, the first of which was to efficiently map the problem into a known quantum algorithm. “That can give you some big gains and we demonstrated some large performance benefits by doing that efficiently, limiting the number of hardware elements needed to represent a problem that matters to Army,” he added.
The second step was to calculate a small part of the prob- lem and then embed it into a much larger quantum classical optimisation loop, to select the best model; and the third step was to develop drop-in replacements for the quantum logic operations that are executed on a quantum computer.
OPTIMISING RESUPPLY OPTIONS
Biercuk said the results of the exercise demonstrated an algorithmic success of around 80-times using the combina-
tion of the three approaches, and the efficient encoding of the problem achieved an eight-times improvement in run clock time against conventional methodologies.
“This was done on real quantum computing hardware and we supplemented it by lots of simulations of larger problems, but this was an early demonstration and, by us- ing algorithms that already exist and attacking all the prac- tical elements that make the algorithm fail or succeed, can give order of magnitude benefits,” Biercuk said.
“This is a known problem with a known algorithm. When we made the three stages of changes, investigating
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