Entropica Releases QAOA Package for Rigetti’s Quantum Cloud Service

(SwissQuantumHub) Entropica has announced the public release of EntropicaQAOA, a free and open source software package implementing the quantum approximate optimisation algorithm (QAOA).
QAOA is an algorithm designed for near-term quantum computers, and has applications to both machine learning and discrete optimisation. The EntropicaQAOA package integrates fully with its partner’s Rigetti’s Quantum Cloud Services ™ (QCS).
The basic goal of QAOA is to find a set of parameters that, when fed to specific operations in a quantum circuit, output the desired solution to the problem. Naturally, the relations that you choose to enforce between the parameters, as well as their initial values, can make a significant difference to the performance of the algorithm. The classical optimiser that provides updated parameters at each step also has an important impact on the efficacy of the algorithm.
In EntropicaQAOA, we provide multiple options for parametrising QAOA, facilitating prototyping and testing of different approaches.