Unconditional quantum advantage with noisy planar architectures
A theoretical preprint analyzes quantum circuits restricted to local operations on a 2D lattice under constant-rate local stochastic noise. It reports that such noisy planar quantum circuits can compute functions outside AC0, the class of constant-depth classical circuits with unbounded fan-in AND, OR, and NOT gates. The abstract indicates the result holds even though the classical circuits are noiseless and have no geometric constraints.
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What this could mean
- 0–2 yearsPlausible
This could reframe near-term quantum advantage experiments to target a separation against constant-depth classical circuits, giving noisy 2D devices a well-defined benchmark they might meet before full fault tolerance.
The result is unconditional and holds under local stochastic noise below a constant threshold, so existing superconducting or neutral-atom processors with local connectivity might be able to implement the required shallow separating circuit. If the separating problem is explicit and the noise threshold matches current achievable error rates, demonstrations could proceed within two years.
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