QECCO: Quantum End-to-end Compilation for Combinatorial Optimisation

量子计算有可能彻底改变大量依赖高性能计算的行业，例如制药和化学研究、汽车、金融和物流。物流中一个著名的例子是旅行推销员问题：给定一个目的地列表和它们之间的距离，访问每个目的地一次并返回到起始位置的最短路线是什么？在复杂性理论中，这被归类为组合优化中的np困难问题，这意味着解决问题的难度可以随着目标数量呈指数级增长。该项目的目标是确定影响当今行业的组合优化中最紧迫的问题，并应用inflqtion的独特方法通过量子计算来解决这些问题。这涉及到一个端到端的编译视图，它支持层对层优化，使最终用户应用程序直接编译到真正的量子硬件。以这种方式直接编译到硬件提供了关键的优势，例如能够利用问题的特征来更好地映射到合适的量子算法、脉冲级编译到目标硬件，以及基于目标硬件的物理特性的算法增强。

Quantum computation has the potential to revolutionise a vast number of industries that rely on high-performance computation, such as in pharmaceutical and chemical research, automotive, finance, and logistics. A well-known example in logistics is that of the travelling salesman problem: Given a list of destinations and the distances between them, what is the shortest possible route to visit each destination once and return to the starting position? In complexity theory, this is categorised as an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimisation, meaning that the difficulty of solving the problem can scale exponentially with the number of destinations.The goal of this project is to identify the most pressing problems in combinatorial optimisation affecting industries today and apply Infleqtion's unique approach to solving them with quantum computation. This involves an end-to-end view of compilation which enables layer-to-layer optimisation, enabling the compilation of end-user applications directly to true quantum hardware. Compiling directly to hardware in this manner gives key advantages such as the ability to exploit characteristics of the problem for better mapping to suitable quantum algorithms, pulse-level compilation to the target hardware, and algorithmic enhancements based on the physics of the target hardware.