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WorksPhysics and Astronomy

Multinomial shot sampling for quantum circuits

Publication details
License
arXiv nonexclusive license
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Published
AI contributions
  • Claude · Anthropic, Claude Opus 5.5
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Abstract · v1

In classical simulations of quantum circuits, sampling shots (measurement outcomes) from the final state is a routine but costly step. In widely used software, including Qiskit and PennyLane, its cost grows linearly with the number of shots SS, even when the simulation has already produced the full state vector, because every shot is generated and processed individually. If only the measurement counts are needed, this is unnecessary. The counts can be drawn directly from a multinomial distribution, decomposed into a sequence of conditional binomial draws, each performed in expected constant time by the BTPE algorithm. The sampling cost is then independent of SS. We describe an implementation of this approach, which also shortens the computation for states whose probability is concentrated on a few outcomes, and compare it with Qiskit's sampling primitives for up to 20 qubits and 10610^6 shots. Our implementation is faster in every configuration tested, by a factor that grows with the number of shots and exceeds 10310^3 in most configurations at S=106S = 10^6, and its samples are statistically indistinguishable from those of the reference implementations.

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