One of the central goals of the DARPA Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (ONISQ) program is to implement a hybrid quantum/classical optimization algorithm with high N⋅p, where N is the number of qubits and p is the number of alternating applications of parameterized quantum operators in the protocol. In this note, we demonstrate the execution of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) applied to the MaxCut problem on non-planar 3-regular graphs with N⋅p of up to 320 on the Quantinuum H1-1 and H2 trapped-ion quantum processors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest N⋅p demonstrated on hardware to date. Our demonstration highlights the rapid progress of quantum hardware.
@article{arxiv.2303.02064,
title = {QAOA with $N\cdot p\geq 200$},
author = {Ruslan Shaydulin and Marco Pistoia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.02064},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Experiments on H2 processor with $N\cdot p = 320$ added in v2