Recently, we partnered with Quantinuum to apply our AI platform, the Hive, to a complex challenge: discovering new algorithms for quantum chemistry.
Scientific breakthroughs increasingly depend on sophisticated algorithms to unlock new discoveries—but designing these algorithms is notoriously difficult. This is particularly the case with quantum algorithms.
Using the Hive, we significantly accelerated this process of algorithmic discovery. By integrating the Hive together with Quantinuum's quantum chemistry platform, InQuanto, our teams were able to discover quantum algorithms which surpass state-of-the-art techniques in just a matter of weeks - in terms of performance, robustness to noise, and resource efficiency.
Unlike many other “black-box” machine learning approaches, the Hive outputs interpretable code. Quantinuum's experts were able to read, understand, and learn from the Hive's discovered algorithms.
Quantinuum's in-house quantum chemistry expert, Dr. David Zsolt Manrique, commented,
“I found it amazing that the Hive converged to a domain-expert level idea. By inspecting the code, we see it has identified the well-known perturbative method, 'MP2', as a useful guide… Further, it systematically and laboriously fine-tuned those MP2-inspired heuristics over many iterations in a way that would be difficult for a human expert to do by hand. It demonstrated an impressive combination of domain expertise and automated machinery that would be useful in exploring novel quantum chemistry methods.”
These initial results demonstrate the potential of Hive in scientific discovery. We are excited to continue our partnership with Quantinuum to tackle more challenging and exciting problems in the future.
Read more about our joint work here.