Its Rebirth is Sorely Needed

Journalism died an excruciating death a long time ago. As a voracious consumer of “news,” I have watched as “reporting” has deteriorated into opinion disguised as “analysis.” It’s misleading and, often, outright wrong.

And it’s pervasive. I normally write about quantum computing, and there you have a field with one serious hype bubble. When I was in the US Army, I discovered the military’s equivalent of tabloid journalism. And American national politics must be the granddaddy of them all.

But, It’s Not Difficult

I have contributed to news media in various capacities over the past two decades. Besides submitting news releases, writing letters to…

After All, Everything is Binary

It’s a subtle reference in the “Mike & Ike" quantum computing bible. I’ve probably skimmed over it quite a few times. But, just a few days ago, I skimmed up to it one more time and just couldn’t get past it.

…in principle one could store an entire text of Shakespeare in the infinite binary expansion of θ.

Wait, what?

I’m still digesting the statement from Dr. Seth Lloyd that a terabit of data can be mapped to 40 qubits. The answer to that seems to be amplitude encoding. …

From Someone Who Has Never Lost

The first political campaign I ever worked on was a successful, local, tripartisan effort. As a follower of American national politics, it was, and continues to be, shocking that Republicans, Democrats, and Independents worked together for the common good despite everyone anticipating a power shift at the end. In fact, to my knowledge, that resultant power shift remains unchanged to this day.

If I recall correctly, I was recruited because I knew several prominent participants personally, and I was known to have good relations with the local media. Furthermore, I was already aware of the first, failed, partisan attempt one…

Use this OpenQASM3 feature now.

The OpenQASM 2.0 specification includes features such as reset gates, syndrome bits, and conditional logic. Until recently, all three features only worked with the quantum computing simulator. Then, all of a sudden, reset gates on real devices became reality.

Introduction

Syndrome bits are usually only referenced in regards to error correction, but they are not limited to that role. If you are allowed to measure qubits early, you can use the results with conditional statements to combine clustering and classification into one circuit, for example. …

What does QV really mean?

I’m working on a three-qubit circuit for a paper, so I can’t show the actual circuit just yet, but the key information about it is that all three qubits are connected. Two-qubit CNOT operations are performed between the first and second qubits, the first and third qubits, and the second and third qubits. Look at qubits 0, 1, and 2 in the connectivity diagram above, as well as qubits 2, 3, and 4. That’s what I need.

Introduction

On a quantum computing simulator, connectivity is no problem; every qubit is magically connected to every other qubit. On real hardware however, this…

Fun With IBM Quantum Reset Gates

Your first quantum computing circuit, the “hello, quantum world" circuit, looks very similar to the circuit above. You learn about superposition and apply a Hadamard gate, and then you learn about entanglement and apply a CNOT gate. This article does not rehash the plethora of tutorials out there.

Recently, IBM Quantum modified some of its devices to finally allow reset gates. Previously, you could only initialize qubits, apply operations to them, and then measure them. Now, you can initialize them, use them, reset them, and use them again.

Going back to where we left off in the circuit, the measurement…

Is there anything Qiskit can’t do?

I’m publishing this article because a short time ago I didn’t know that building arrays of quantum computing circuits was possible. In retrospect, considering everything the Python language can do, this really shouldn’t have surprised me. However, I did have to ask some questions and do some troubleshooting, so I’ll try to simplify this learning process for anyone who reads this.

Introduction

All the quantum computing tutorials and articles I’ve read have always shown the construction of just one circuit. You build it and then you run it. …

A Second Estimation Technique

In my article titled, “Benchmarking Quantum Advantage,” I wrote about a non-mathematical way to determine if your quantum algorithm can outperform its classical counterparts. TL;DR: notwithstanding queue times, quantum processors have a range of minimum-to-maximum runtimes; the classical algorithms need to at least be slower than these benchmarks. To impress anybody, they probably need to be much, much slower, but, again, you can initialize the maximum number of qubits and add a ridiculous amount of circuit depth and IBM Quantum, anyway, will give you the maximum runtime for any circuit run on that particular device. …