Equation 3 · Variational Evolution: How Quantum Computers Learn Their Answers
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Everything else — deciding whether that energy is good, and deciding what to try next — happens on an ordinary classical processor. The quantum device answers one question, over and over: how good was this guess. The classical processor never touches a qubit; it only ever sees numbers.
Sources cited in the article section
- [1] A variational eigenvalue solver on a photonic quantum processor ↗
- [2] A Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm ↗
- [5] Variational quantum algorithms ↗
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