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What is QAOA?
QAOA combines parameterised quantum circuits with classical optimisation to search for approximate solutions to combinatorial optimisation problems such as MaxCut.
QAOA turns the problem into a cost function and applies “cost” and “mixing” layers in turn. The angles of the layers are tuned by classical optimisation, raising the probability of measuring good solutions.
MaxCut, which splits a graph in two to maximise the number of cut edges, is QAOA’s classic example. Its advantage over classical algorithms on real problems is still being researched.
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Related concepts
- VQE (variational quantum eigensolver) · VQE is a hybrid quantum algorithm that approximates the ground-state energy of a molecule by tuning a parameterised quantum circuit in a classical optimisation loop.
- NISQ (noisy intermediate-scale quantum) · NISQ is the current era of quantum computing, named by John Preskill in 2018: devices with tens to a few hundred noisy qubits and no error correction.