Physical Review Research (Jan 2021)

Crowdsourcing human common sense for quantum control

  • Jesper Hasseriis Mohr Jensen,
  • Miroslav Gajdacz,
  • Shaeema Zaman Ahmed,
  • Jakub Herman Czarkowski,
  • Carrie Weidner,
  • Janet Rafner,
  • Jens Jakob Sørensen,
  • Klaus Mølmer,
  • Jacob Friis Sherson

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.013057
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 3, no. 1
p. 013057

Abstract

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Citizen science methodologies have over the past decade been applied with great success to help solve highly complex numerical challenges. Here, we take early steps in the quantum physics arena by introducing a citizen science game, Quantum Moves 2, and compare the performance of different optimization methods across three different quantum optimal control problems of varying difficulty. Inside the game, players can apply a gradient-based algorithm (running locally on their device) to optimize their solutions and we find that these results perform roughly on par with the best of the tested standard optimization methods performed on a computer cluster. In addition, cluster-optimized player seeds was the only method to exhibit roughly optimal performance across all three challenges. Finally, player seeds show significant statistical advantages over random seeds in the limit of sparse sampling. This highlights the potential for crowdsourcing the solution of future quantum research problems.