English

Universal Statistical Simulator

Quantum Physics 2022-02-04 v1

Abstract

The Quantum Fourier Transform is a famous example in quantum computing for being the first demonstration of a useful algorithm in which a quantum computer is exponentially faster than a classical computer. However when giving an explanation of the speed up, understanding computational complexity of a classical calculation has to be taken on faith. Moreover, the explanation also comes with the caveat that the current classical calculations might be improved. In this paper we present a quantum computer code for a Galton Board Simulator that is exponentially faster than a classical calculation using an example that can be intuitively understood without requiring an understanding of computational complexity. We demonstrate a straight forward implementation on a quantum computer, using only three types of quantum gate, which calculates 2n2^n trajectories using O(n2)\mathcal{O} (n^2) resources. The circuit presented here also benefits from having a lower depth than previous Quantum Galton Boards, and in addition, we show that it can be extended to a universal statistical simulator which is achieved by removing pegs and altering the left-right ratio for each peg.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.01735,
  title  = {Universal Statistical Simulator},
  author = {Mark Carney and Ben Varcoe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.01735},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

20 pages, 14 figures, 2 tables, 4 appendices

R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:18:26.530Z