Fig. 10: Experimental results for N = 32 in trapped-ion quantum hardware: The AR from the random guess (uniform over all feasible solutions) is 0.7801.
From: Alignment between initial state and mixer improves QAOA performance for constrained optimization
For ARs from Trotter-number-1 (T = 1) and Trotter-number-2 (T = 2) QAOA, hardware results are 0.8638 and 0.8424, while noiseless simulator results are 0.8808 and 0.8816. The hardware results, though impacted by noise, are significantly better than the random guess. To evaluate ARs, we post-selected feasible solutions in the hardware experiments, selecting 213 and 172 feasible samples out of 2500 shots in T = 1 and T = 2 experiments. The post-selection ratio is significantly better than a random selection of 0.0047%. The p-value of the independent two-sample t-test for the two groups of feasible samples is 0.0344, indicating a significant difference between the means of the two groups. For visualization purposes, we exclude one outlier with AR < 0.35 in the swarm plot of both T = 1 and T = 2 experiments.
