Understanding Bugs in Quantum Simulators: An Empirical Study

Quantum simulator software is increasingly critical to quantum computing research, yet little is known about the nature and distribution of bugs in these systems. This paper presents an empirical study characterizing bugs in open-source quantum simulators.

Abstract

We present a systematic empirical study of bugs in quantum simulator software. Through annotation and classification of bug reports from open-source quantum simulator repositories, we construct a dataset supporting rigorous analysis of bug categories, root causes, and fix patterns. Our findings provide insights into the unique software engineering challenges posed by quantum simulation, informing future work on testing and verification methods for this domain.

Available on arXiv.