Does it work? Like I said in my first book, “Dungeons & Qubits, an Adventurer’s Tale Beyond the Quantum Computing Tutorials,” (which is pending an update, by the way) sometimes you just need to experiment. I recently wrote about how relative phase Toffoli gates can reduce circuit depth, albeit with a caveat, but…

“Gate by gate, ooh baby!” I’ve read the OpenQASM 2.0 specification multiple times, and I thought I had a fairly good grasp on it. After all, I still consider myself IBM’s first and only unofficial OpenQASM Advocate. …

Achievement Unlocked At the end of my first book, “Dungeons & Qubits: an Adventurer’s Tale Beyond the Quantum Computing Tutorials,” is a section titled, “Wish List.” In this section, I listed six projects that I was hoping to work on in the near future. …

Here are the generic lessons. Over the years, I’ve signed up for multiple coding competitions. I’ve always looked at the problems, quickly lost interest, and I’ve never ended up actually submitting anything. Classiq’s Coding Competition marks the first contest I’ve ever actually competed in, and I must say I learned a lot. …

TL;DR: Simpler is Better The Classiq Coding Competition included a Hamiltonian simulation problem. Although quantum chemistry is not my area of expertise, I can read code and analyze circuits. I can tell when it seems to be working, as well as when it seems not to be working. …

The Log-Normal State Preparation Challenge The Classiq Coding Competition included a Log-Normal State Preparation challenge. The real challenge — spoiler alert — was classical discretization. Many quantum algorithms rely on initializing qubits in a specific state. The promised speedup of the algorithm depends on the ability to prepare the quantum state efficiently. The challenge of…

This isn’t in “Mike & Ike” …. The Classiq Coding Competition included a Toffoli decomposition problem. The go to source for that — okay, there are many — is the unofficial Bible of quantum computing, “Mike & Ike.” Its official title, by the way, is “Quantum Computation and Quantum Information,” and it is by Michael “Mike” Nielsen…

This challenge left me satisfied. One of the four challenges of the Classiq Coding Competition was to solve a constraint satisfaction problem using Grover’s Algorithm. Specifically, the challenge was to solve a Kakuro logic puzzle. Kakuro is a logic puzzle, often referred to as a mathematical transliteration of the crossword. The puzzle is played on…

Because Qubits Are Still In Short Supply One of the challenges of the 2022 Classiq Coding Competition was to design a 14CX gate, a gate with 14 control qubits and 1 target qubit, with the least circuit depth and the lowest CNOT count. The catch, if you’ll allow me to call it that, was that you could…