Hands-on lab · 1 step
Shot-noise variance of gradient estimators
Compare the two gradient estimators available on quantum hardware for of the state : the central finite difference with step and the parameter-shift rule. Both use two circuit evaluations of shots; you compute the exact shot-noise variance of each and see a factor between them.
Step 1: Variance of the FD and parameter-shift estimators
The one-qubit circuit with is measured in the computational basis, and each shot returns (outcome ) or (outcome ). The model output is
An evaluation runs the circuit at angle for fresh shots and returns the mean of the outcomes; different evaluations use independent shots. Consider the two gradient estimators
At and , compute
(a) the variance of the central finite-difference estimator with ;
(b) the variance of the parameter-shift estimator.
Enter two real numbers in this order. Each value is graded with relative tolerance (plus an absolute ). You may type decimals such as 2.5e-4 or exact expressions such as 1/(40.01^21000); an expression must be correct to within .