Generation of Truly Random Numbers on a Quantum Annealer
Abstract
This study investigates how qubits of modern quantum annealers (QA) such as D-Wave can be applied for generating truly random numbers. We show how a QA can be initialised and how the annealing schedule can be set so that after the annealing, thousands of truly random binary numbers are measured in parallel. Those can then be converted to uniformly distributed natural or real numbers in desired ranges, either biased or unbiased. We discuss the observed qubits' properties and their influence on the random number generation and consider various physical factors that influence the performance of our generator, i.e., digital-to-analogue quantisation errors, flux errors, temperature errors and spin bath polarisation. The numbers generated by the proposed algorithm successfully pass various tests on randomness from the NIST test suite.
Random Number Generation using Quantum Annealing
Classical computers operate deterministically and cannot be used to generate truly random numbers. Instead, they rely on pseudo random number generators that produce statistical approximations of random numbers. However, while some applications may tolerate replacing truly random numbers by pseudo-random ones, others may lose crucial properties, e.g., true unpredictability in security contexts. We use Radio Frequency Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (RF-SQUID) qubits present in current generation D-Wave Quantum Annealers to produce truly random bits. Quantum Annealers have several thousands of qubits, but solve Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimisation (QUBO) problems and do not offer the flexibility to directly measure qubits. Performing an anneal, inevitably adds additional noise to the system. To mitigate any effect of correlated noise on the output bits, we generate embeddings in a staggered manner. Additionally, we emperically find that the effect of noise is uncorrelated to the number of qubits we utilised. This fascilitates the usage of almost all qubits present in the quantum processing unit to generate random numbers.
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Citation
@article{bhatia2022qrng,
author = {Bhatia, Harshil and Tretschk, Edith and Theobalt, Christian and Golyanik, Vladislav},
title = {Generation of Truly Random Numbers on a Quantum Annealer},
journal = {IEEE Access},
year = {2022},
volume={10},
pages={112832-112844},
}
Contact
For questions, clarifications, please get in touch with:Harshil Bhatia bhatia.2@iitj.ac.in, hbhatia@mpi-inf.mpg.de
Edith Tretschk tretschk@mpi-inf.mpg.de
Vladislav Golyanik golyanik@mpi-inf.mpg.de