Implementing Grover’s Algorithm on the IBM Quantum Computers

This paper focuses on testing the current viability of using quantum computers for the processing of data-driven tasks fueled by emerging data science applications. We test the publicly available IBM quantum computers using Grover’s algorithm, a well-known quantum search algorithm, to obtain a baseline for the general evaluations of these quantum devices and to investigate the impacts of various factors such as number of quantum bits (or qubits), qubit choice, and device choice. The main contributions of this paper include a new 4-qubit implementation of Grover’s algorithm and test results showing the current capabilities of quantum computers. Our study indicates that quantum computers can currently only be used accurately for solving simple problems with very small amounts of data. There are also notable differences between different selections of the qubits in the implementation design and between different quantum devices that execute the algorithm.