Testing Maximal Independent Set (MIS) with QuEra’s Aquila
TL;DR: It works!
This is a companion article to Russ Fein’s article “Quantum Computing with Neutral Atoms.” This article is the third in a series of articles reviewing the hands-on usage of publicly-available neutral atom products.
Step 1, as discussed in my recent article “I love neutral atoms,” was to figure out how to arrange individual atoms on QuEra’s 256-qubit “Aquila” neutral atom quantum computer. It turns out that’s relatively easy; you simply supply coordinates. Step 2, therefore, is to try to do something useful with this newfound skill. And since you don’t just walk up to home plate and hit a home run at your first ever at-bat, I decided to just try to hit a ground ball and get on base. That means selecting a toy problem, running it on a simulator to see what right looks like, and then running it on Aquila (through the qBraid platform) and hoping to see a similar result.
Arrange the Atoms
This pattern actually comes from one of QuEra’s competitors, which shall remain nameless. Their competitor’s hardware is not publicly accessible, and I wanted to run it on real…
