DETAILED ACTION
Claims 1-8, 10-12, and 21-27 are presented for examination.
Claims 1-3, 5-7 and 21-27 have been amended.
Claims 9, and 13-20 have been previously cancelled.
Claims 21-27 were previously added.
This office action is in response to the amendment submitted on 17-Mar-2026.
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 29-AUG-2025 has been entered.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Arguments – 35 USC 103
On pgs. 9-10 of the Applicant/Arguments Remarks, the applicant argues ProjectQ does not teach or suggest generating a testing quantum circuit with testing components that are external to the quantum circuit. Nor does ProjectQ teach or suggest the simulation of such a testing quantum circuit. The secondary reference does not cure this deficiency of ProjectQ.
The examiner respectfully disagrees. As disclosed on Pg. 1-2, ProjectQ teaches running simulators for testing: “This includes not only the different hardware platforms, but also simulators, emulators, and resource estimators, which can be used for testing, debugging, and benchmarking algorithms.” Additionally, ProjectQ teaches QC generation, the simulator/emulator/resource estimators provide the external testing components.
The applicant additionally argues the Office Action relies upon Jacak for inspecting qubit states because ProjectQ is admitted to not disclose or teach this feature. However, Jacak does not teach or suggest "inspecting, by the one or more inspectors, states of the plurality of qubits from said executing the testing quantum circuit" of a simulation. In fact, the cited portions of Jacak are at best a verification of randomness in a Quantum Random Number Generator, with no disclosure or teaching of inspecting quantum states from an executed simulation.
The examiner respectfully disagrees. The OA is relying on Jacak for the inspecting limitation for clarity’s sake. In fact, ProjectQ does have measurement/inspectors, and state setters as well. Additionally, Jacak does teach inspecting the states of the plurality of qubits, while ProjectQ provides the testing QC. Both arts are analogous and it would be obvious for a PHOSITA to combine Jacak’s inspection techniques within ProjectQ’s framework of QC generation, testing, and simulation.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1-8, 10-12 and 21-27 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Steiger et al. (ProjectQ) in view of Jacak et al. (US20230205490A1).
Regarding Claim 1, Steiger teaches obtaining a quantum circuit, wherein the quantum circuit manipulates a plurality of qubits over a plurality of cycles ( Fig. 1 shows the quantum circuit representation. It shows the plurality of qubits being manipulated).
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wherein trusted role indications of the plurality of qubits are not available (Pg. 5, “Certain subroutines such as the multicontrolled NOT construction by Barenco et al. [14] or the constant-addition circuit by Häner et al. [12] do not require clean ancilla qubits in a defined computational basis state (such as |0i) but work with borrowed qubits in an unknown arbitrary quantum state. They guarantee that after completion of the circuit, these so-called dirty ancilla qubits have returned to their starting state.”)
generating a testing quantum circuit that comprises the quantum circuit and a plurality of testing components that are external to the quantum circuit (Pg. 12, “When using the CircuitDrawer back-end, i.e., eng = MainEngine ( CircuitDrawer ()) the quantum circuit depicted in Fig. 8 is generated.” Pg. 5, “The simulator can be used as a debugging tool to validate uncompute sections since it throws an exception whenever a qubit in superposition is being deallocated. Thus, qubits have to be either measured or uncomputed prior to deallocation.” EN: The debugging tool and it’s validation/measurement/allocation/deallocation are external to the QC)
wherein the plurality of testing component comprises one or more quantum state setters and one or more inspectors (Please refer to Pg. 5, code example 1 reproduced below. The Allocate function is a state setter. The measure function is an inspector, when used by the debugger/testing circuit, they are external to the QC)
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Simulating, the testing quantum circuit utilizing a simulator, simulating comprising (Pg. 2, “ProjectQ, containing the means to compile, simulate, emulate, and, ultimately, run quantum algorithms on actual hardware.” Pg. 5, “The simulator can be used as a debugging tool to validate uncompute sections since it throws an exception whenever a qubit in superposition is being deallocated. Thus, qubits have to be either measured or uncomputed prior to deallocation.” EN: The testing circuit is simulated. Please refer to code example 1 showing the qubit allocation, hadamard gate setting and the measure/inspector operation)
Applying by the one or more quantum state setters, one or more initial states to the plurality of qubits (Pg. 4, “This minimal code example allocates one qubit in state |0> and applies a Hadamard gate before measuring it in the computational basis and printing the outcome.” EN: The code example from pg. 4 allocate the qubit and initializes its state to |0>)
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Executing the testing quantum circuit (Pg. 8, “For efficient testing of quantum algorithms at a high level of abstraction, our simulator provides quantum emulation features as well: By specifying the level of abstraction at which to emulate (using, e.g., an InstructionFilter and an AutoReplacer, see Sec. 4.2), these features can be enabled or disabled. As an example, consider our AddConstant gate from Sec. 4.1: With a small modification to the gate definition, the addition can be carried out directly, without having to decompose it into QFT and phase-shift gates (and then further into 1- and 2-qubit gates only). Gates which execute classical mathematical functions on a superposition of values can derive from BasicMathGate and then provide a Python function mimicking this behavior in the __init__ function of the AddConstant gate” and Fig. 7, “The lazy evaluation of gates in combination with intrinsics instructions allows the ProjectQ simulator to execute this circuit between 3 and 5 times faster.” Also see code example 1)
Compiling an executable quantum circuit based on the testing quantum circuit simulating and a determined indicator that (Pg. 1, “We propose to use a device independent high-level language with an intuitive syntax and a modular compiler design, as discussed in Ref. [2]. The quantum compiler then transforms the high-level language to hardware instructions, optimizing over all the different intermediate representations of the quantum program, as depicted in Fig. 1.” And Pg. 6, “different specialized decomposition rules can be defined from which the compiler can then choose the best one for the target back-end by evaluating a user-defined cost function Furthermore, if the back-end natively supports certain gate operations, such as a many-qubit Mølmer-Sørensen gate [15] on ion trap quantum computers, the decomposition step may be skipped altogether. The AddConstant gate is also natively supported in our quantum emulator, which allows faster execution by orders of magnitude compared to simulating the individual gates of its implementation [4].”)
One or more of the plurality of qubits are robust qubits wherein each qubit of the robust qubits comprises a respective dirty auxiliary qubit that has an original unknown state before a manipulation by the testing quantum circuit and restores the original unknown state after the manipulation regardless of the quantum states of the remaining qubits from the plurality of qubits (Pg. 5, “Certain subroutines such as the multicontrolled NOT construction by Barenco et al. [14] or the constant-addition circuit by Häner et al. [12] do not require clean ancilla qubits in a defined computational basis state (such as |0>) but work with borrowed qubits in an unknown arbitrary quantum state. They guarantee that after completion of the circuit, these so-called dirty ancilla qubits have returned to their starting state”)
However, ProjectQ is not relied on for:
Inspecting by the one or more inspectors, states of the plurality of qubits from said executing the testing quantum circuit;
Jacak teaches Inspecting by the one or more inspectors, states of the plurality of qubits from said executing the testing quantum circuit ([0015] “Therefore a QRNG system combining both the quantum black-box and the system for post-processing of the generated classical bits (in most trivial case only verifying upon stringest classical measures the level of randomness of the generated bits sequence” and [0041] “As to determine which type of correlation one deals with at the entangles state of 2 qubits, one must measure both qubits to get the classical information (measurement outcome) to identify the type of the correlation.” EN: Jacak is inspecting through measurement. ProjectQ provides the testing QC).
ProjectQ and Jacak are analogous art because they are from the same field of endeavor in quantum computing and simulation. Before the effective filing date of the invention, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, to combine ProjectQ and Jack to arrive at a more robust simulation framework for quantum circuits that involve entanglement. “In this work we aim to present some special aspects of quantum entanglement in a topological interpretation and discuss possible applications.” (Jacak, [0008])
Regarding Claim 2, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 1. ProjectQ further teaches simulating comprises applying one or more inverse quantum state setters, wherein the one or more quantum state setters are operatively coupled to the plurality of qubits before being manipulated by the quantum circuit, wherein the one or more inverse quantum state setters are operatively coupled to the plurality of qubits after being manipulated by the testing quantum circuit, wherein the one or more inverse quantum state setters are configured to reverse the one or more initial states (Pg 2, “Figure 2: Circuit for carrying out two controlled Fourier transform additions in sequence: An optimizer can identify the QFT with its inverse, allowing to cancel those two operations. This identification is much harder or even impossible after decomposing operations and synthesizing rotation gates. Furthermore, since QFT†QFT = 1, the quantum Fourier transform does not need to be controlled, which can be achieved using our Compute/Uncompute meta-instructions (see Sec. 4.1.3).” QFT is a quantum state setter. The compute/uncompute reverses the initial state. Fig 2 shows the QFT coupled before the manipulation and the inverse after the manipulation.)
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Regarding Claim 3, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 1. Jacak further teaches wherein the testing quantum circuit- further comprises one or more additional qubits that are external of the quantum circuit, wherein the plurality of qubits excludes the one or more additional qubits ([0050] “In order to prevent attacks on the protocol based on the decreased measures of entanglement between the distributed qubits states (in essence with external eavesdropping qubits being co-entangled, thus taking the 3 or in general n qubit states out of their maximal and symmetrical entangled configurations) this QRNG protocol could be supplemented in the initial stage with well-known protocols of entanglement distillation and purification [33-35])”).
Regarding Claim 4, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 3. Jacak further teaches simulating comprises pairing the plurality of qubits to the one or more additional qubits, respectively, thereby obtaining a plurality of disjoint qubit pairs ([0089] “For clarity with the 4-qubits entangled state one will have… where qubits X, Y and Z are auxiliary qubits for setting random state of 4 qubits A, B, C and D”).
applying, using the one or more quantum state setters, a maximally-entangled state to each of the plurality of qubit pairs ([0093] “one should remind that 3-qubit GHZ state if measured for 1 qubit projects all remaining qubits to disentangled pure states, the 3-qubits generalized Bell state if measured for 1 qubit projects the remaining 2 to maximally entangled 2-qubit Bell states—correlated or anticorrelated based on the 1st qubit measurement outcome, and finally the 3-qubits W state after measurement of 1 qubit projects the remaining 2 to either unentangled correlated (the same) pure states or alternative to maximally entangled Bell state (depending on the outcome of the first qubit measurement).”).
Regarding Claim 5, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 4. Jacak further teaches simulating comprises iteratively: selecting computational basis states for the plurality of qubits, respectively, and applying, by the one or more quantum state setters, the computational basis states to each of the plurality of qubit pairs ([0092] “Final measurement of one of the C and D qubits set their states (all three measurements are considered in computational basis, similarly as all mentioned measurements in the invention description). Iterating of such procedure for series of states ΨABCD will result in 4 sequences, where 3 are independent, similarly as in the beginning of this section”).
Regarding Claim 6, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 1. ProjectQ further teaches wherein the testing quantum circuit is configured to perform said simulating and said inspecting (Pg. 1, “The framework allows testing of quantum algorithms through simulation and enables running them on actual quantum hardware using a back-end connecting to the IBM Quantum Experience cloud service.”).
Regarding Claim 7, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 6. ProjectQ further teaches iteratively executing the testing quantum circuit for one or more qubits of the plurality of qubits wherein, in each iteration (Pg. 13, The python code illustrates iterative execution with a for loop).
untrusted role indications are generated and provided to the testing quantum circuit by indicating that an inspected qubit of the one or more qubits is a dirty auxiliary qubit and that the remaining qubits of the plurality of qubits are argument qubits (Pg. 13, The python code example contains the ctrl_qubit, the dirty auxiliary qubit, and the x as the argument. In each iteration the ctrl_qubit is measured and the roles are separated. Pg. 5, “Certain subroutines such as the multicontrolled NOT construction by Barenco et al. [14] or the constant-addition circuit by Häner et al. [12] do not require clean ancilla qubits in a defined computational basis state (such as |0>) but work with borrowed qubits in an unknown arbitrary quantum state. They guarantee that after completion of the circuit, these so-called dirty ancilla qubits have returned to their starting state. Our compiler can thus optimize the allocation of such ancilla qubits by simply providing a qubit which is currently unused, independent of its state: qubit = eng. allocate_qubit ( dirty = True )”)
Regarding Claim 8, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 1. Jacak further teaches utilizing one of: a reduced density matrix and measurements ([0005] “Within this situation vector states formalism is thus not sufficient anymore to describe each qubit (as they are not normalized) and the density matrix formalism is required as a resort to describe the mixed state (the mixed states being the reduced density matrices of the complex system, i.e. a density matrices traced over degrees of freedom of the remainings of the complex system)” [0005] further expands on the usage of the reduced density matrices and their respective measurements).
Regarding Claim 10, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 1. Jacak further teaches detecting is performed without iteratively checking each potential subgroup of the plurality of qubits individually ([0007] describes the identification of the system as a whole, without iterating through each qubit. “In such a case local decoherence of any one of entangled n qubits will not cause any significant deviation for state of the whole system, and in particular to the degree of mixedness of any other individual qubit (the decohered qubit in the worst case of the complete decoherence will simply disentangle from the whole W state entangled ensemble, leaving the n−1 qubits state in the following not much deviated from the original configuration”).
Regarding Claim 11, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 1. ProjectQ further teaches untrusted role indications comprise one or more auxiliary qubit indications indicating one or more unverified qubits within the plurality of qubits of the quantum circuit (Pg 5, “Certain subroutines such as the multicontrolled NOT construction by Barenco et al. [14] or the constant-addition circuit by Häner et al. [12] do not require clean ancilla qubits in a defined computational basis state (such as |0>) but work with borrowed qubits in an unknown arbitrary quantum state. They guarantee that after completion of the circuit, these so-called dirty ancilla qubits have returned to their starting state. Our compiler can thus optimize the allocation of such ancilla qubits by simply providing a qubit which is currently unused, independent of its state: qubit = eng. allocate_qubit ( dirty = True )”).
Regarding Claim 12, ProjectQ in view of Jacak teaches the method of claim 1. ProjectQ further teaches a qubit of the plurality of qubits is robust to the quantum states of the remaining qubits in case an auxiliary property is complied with by the qubit for each initial state of the plurality of qubits (Pg. 5, “They guarantee that after completion of the circuit, these so-called dirty ancilla qubits have returned to their starting state”).
Regarding Claim 21 Jacak teaches an apparatus comprising a processor and coupled memory, said processor being adapted to ([0002] “An example of PRNGs are classical computer processors which can generate pseudo random sequences in relation to their deterministic operation within complex algorithms”).
The remaining limitations are similar to claim 1 and are rejected under the same rationale.
Claims 22-26 are apparatus claims reciting limitations similar to claims 2-5, 6 and 7 respectively and are rejected under the same rationale.
Regarding Claim 27 Jacak teaches computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer readable medium retaining program instructions, which program instructions, when read by a processor, cause the processor to ([0002] “An example of PRNGs are classical computer processors which can generate pseudo random sequences in relation to their deterministic operation within complex algorithms”).
The remaining limitations are similar to claim 1 and are rejected under the same rationale.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Pednault et al (US20190095561A1): Discloses simulating quantum circuits.
Gidney (Halving the cost of quantum addition): expands on the practice of using dirty robust qubits.
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to AMIR DARWISH whose telephone number is (571)272-4779. The examiner can normally be reached 7:30-5:30 M-Thurs.
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/A.E.D./Examiner, Art Unit 2199
/LEWIS A BULLOCK JR/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2199
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