4 ms·

I'd hope one milestone is "Someone with no knowledge of physics, nor a desire gain any, is capable of programming with this hardware/software." Is that feasibl

by scj 9y ago

I'd hope one milestone is "Someone with no knowledge of physics, nor a desire gain any, is capable of programming with this hardware/software." Is that feasible? Is it desirable?

reikonomusha 9y ago
That's my goal! It is desirable, and I think it is feasible. I said in another comment that I think the best thing we can do is get quantum devices in the hands of people and let them play. Unfortunately, for a long time, quantum computers and their programming have been so utterly out-of-reach and opaque that that has been difficult. Now I think we are taking good steps to opening the possibility of experimentation up.
- scj 9y ago
  Just to give you an idea, I've spent about 30-45 minutes reading over various materials (the Github links). I think my level of knowledge would be equivalent of understanding how dup, drop, and rot work in FORTH (or car and cdr in Lisp)... Basic element manipulation (bit/qubit, stack, and list). The difference though, is that I only needed to understand there was a container of multiple items in FORTH and Lisp. For basic element manipulation, I needed to understand matrices. At this rate, it would take hours before I understand how to write a basic program. And my trailblazer sense is already tingling (that I should let others be pioneers). Normally I'd just resume lurker mode at this point, but my interest in combinatorics is driving my curiosity towards understanding what might be possible.
  - reikonomusha 9y ago
    I admit it is an unusually larger leap to get to anything useful. We have been blessed to have such a fantastic and intuitive understanding of classical computing. We can pick up most new programming languages gradually and efficiently. When the fundamental object of manipulation is this wacky thing called a "state vector in 2^n dimensional Hilbert space" as opposed to "a bag of bits", and operations must be reversible, and ... and ... and ..., things are just harder. I hope we (both Rigetti and the quantum computing community at large) can continue to refine and simplify the concepts at hand.

by scj 9y ago

I'd hope one milestone is "Someone with no knowledge of physics, nor a desire gain any, is capable of programming with this hardware/software." Is that feasible? Is it desirable?

reikonomusha 9y ago

That's my goal! It is desirable, and I think it is feasible. I said in another comment that I think the best thing we can do is get quantum devices in the hands of people and let them play. Unfortunately, for a long time, quantum computers and their programming have been so utterly out-of-reach and opaque that that has been difficult. Now I think we are taking good steps to opening the possibility of experimentation up.

scj 9y ago
Just to give you an idea, I've spent about 30-45 minutes reading over various materials (the Github links). I think my level of knowledge would be equivalent of understanding how dup, drop, and rot work in FORTH (or car and cdr in Lisp)... Basic element manipulation (bit/qubit, stack, and list). The difference though, is that I only needed to understand there was a container of multiple items in FORTH and Lisp. For basic element manipulation, I needed to understand matrices. At this rate, it would take hours before I understand how to write a basic program. And my trailblazer sense is already tingling (that I should let others be pioneers). Normally I'd just resume lurker mode at this point, but my interest in combinatorics is driving my curiosity towards understanding what might be possible.
- reikonomusha 9y ago
  I admit it is an unusually larger leap to get to anything useful. We have been blessed to have such a fantastic and intuitive understanding of classical computing. We can pick up most new programming languages gradually and efficiently. When the fundamental object of manipulation is this wacky thing called a "state vector in 2^n dimensional Hilbert space" as opposed to "a bag of bits", and operations must be reversible, and ... and ... and ..., things are just harder. I hope we (both Rigetti and the quantum computing community at large) can continue to refine and simplify the concepts at hand.