Bugs in Quantum Computing Platforms: An Empirical Study
Matteo Paltenghi, Michael Pradel

TL;DR
This study analyzes 223 real-world bugs in quantum computing platforms, revealing that nearly 40% are quantum-specific, often manifesting as unexpected outputs, and introduces a hierarchy of bug patterns to aid developers.
Contribution
It provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of bugs in quantum platforms, identifying quantum-specific bugs and proposing a hierarchy of bug patterns for improved debugging.
Findings
39.9% of bugs are quantum-specific
Quantum bugs often cause unexpected outputs
Introduces a hierarchy of 10 quantum-specific bug patterns
Abstract
The interest in quantum computing is growing, and with it, the importance of software platforms to develop quantum programs. Ensuring the correctness of such platforms is important, and it requires a thorough understanding of the bugs they typically suffer from. To address this need, this paper presents the first in-depth study of bugs in quantum computing platforms. We gather and inspect a set of 223 real-world bugs from 18 open-source quantum computing platforms. Our study shows that a significant fraction of these bugs (39.9%) are quantum-specific, calling for dedicated approaches to prevent and find them. The bugs are spread across various components, but quantum-specific bugs occur particularly often in components that represent, compile, and optimize quantum programming abstractions. Many quantum-specific bugs manifest through unexpected outputs, rather than more obvious signs of…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsCloud Computing and Resource Management · Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
