ManQala: Game-Inspired Strategies for Quantum State Engineering
Abstract
The ability to prepare systems in specific target states through quantum engineering is essential for realizing the new technologies promised by a second quantum revolution. Here, we recast the fundamental problem of state preparation in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces as ManQala, a quantum game inspired by the West African sowing game mancala. Motivated by optimal gameplay in solitaire mancala, where nested nearest-neighbor permutations and actions evolve the state of the game board to its target configuration, ManQala acts as a pre-processing approach for deterministically arranging particles in a quantum control problem. Once pre-processing with ManQala is complete, existing quantum control methods are applied, but now with a reduced search space. We find that ManQala-type strategies match, or outperform, competing approaches in terms of final state variance even in small-scale quantum state engineering problems where we expect the slightest advantage since the relative reduction in search space is the least. These results suggest that ManQala provides a rich platform for designing control protocols relevant to near-term intermediate-scale quantum technologies.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2302.14582,
title = {ManQala: Game-Inspired Strategies for Quantum State Engineering},
author = {Onur Danaci and Wenlei Zhang and Robert Coleman and William Djakam and Michaela Amoo and Ryan T. Glasser and Brian T. Kirby and Moussa N'Gom and Thomas A. Searles},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.14582},
year = {2023}
}