Lecture 8. Classical simulation of quantum circuits

On this Lecture we discussed problems of simulation of quantum circuits on classical computers. We consider two types of simulation problems: weak simulation (generation of outcomes of a quantum circuit) and strong simulation (calculation of probabilities of outcomes). Knowing how to do strong simulation, we can generate the outcome of a circuit bit-by-bit; knowing how to do weak simulation, we can perform statistical estimation of the probability of a particular outcome. Then, we discussed the two simplest methods of strong simulation of quantum circuits – Schrödinger simulation and Feynman simulation.