Quantum Computing Is So Easy A Child Can Do It!

Okay, okay, okay… quantum computing isn’t easy. However, I started learning BASIC and Logo at a relatively young age (I might be dating myself here), and I was wondering if my future 6th grader could build, run, and understand at least the “hello, quantum world” experiment.

I had already given my student a high-level understanding of superposition and quantum entanglement, so I started with a review of both concepts. To ensure understanding, I then had my student explain both concepts back to me. We then sketched our circuit out on paper, along with the histogram that we should expect to see. I explained why we would not see perfect results on a real quantum processor, as well as why we would not see a perfect 50/50 split on a simulator either.

To keep our experiment as simple as possible, we used the IBMQ drag-and-drop circuit builder. As my student built our circuit, we not only reviewed what each gate was doing, we also glanced over to the circuit editor and watched the OpenQASM (Quantum Assembly Language) being written for us.

Mere minutes into our experiment, my student tapped the big blue “run” button and sent our circuit to the simulator. After reviewing the results, we went back to our circuit, tapped tbe big blue “run” button again, and sent our circuit to ibmqx2, a cloud-based, 5-qubit quantum processor.