WHY ISN'T MY 50/50 SPLIT EXACTLY 50/50? 🎲
You put an H gate on a qubit, ran it, and got something like 53/47 instead of a clean 50/50. Is the simulator broken?
Nope — that's sampling noise, and it's exactly what a real quantum computer gives you too.
Each run (shot) is one coin flip. Flip a fair coin 100 times and you'll rarely get exactly 50 heads. The histogram converges to 50/50 as shots go up, but any finite sample wobbles.
Rule of thumb: with N shots, expect the percentages to wobble by roughly 1 over the square root of N. 100 shots → around ±10%. 10,000 shots → around ±1%.
This matters beyond homework: real quantum algorithms have to be designed knowing every answer comes wrapped in this statistical fuzz.
You put an H gate on a qubit, ran it, and got something like 53/47 instead of a clean 50/50. Is the simulator broken?
Nope — that's sampling noise, and it's exactly what a real quantum computer gives you too.
Each run (shot) is one coin flip. Flip a fair coin 100 times and you'll rarely get exactly 50 heads. The histogram converges to 50/50 as shots go up, but any finite sample wobbles.
Rule of thumb: with N shots, expect the percentages to wobble by roughly 1 over the square root of N. 100 shots → around ±10%. 10,000 shots → around ±1%.
This matters beyond homework: real quantum algorithms have to be designed knowing every answer comes wrapped in this statistical fuzz.
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