5 ms·

If there's something that I began to scratch and easily loose myself is imagining how do you program something using qubits, how the language looks like, or eve

If there's something that I began to scratch and easily loose myself is imagining how do you program something using qubits, how the language looks like, or even an algorithm. In few seconds I come back to the 0-or-1 kind of thinking and can't advance.

52-6F-62 9y ago
See, for example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-qr-intro?view=qsharp-preview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-qr-intro?vi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit Going further... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic edit: The Microsoft Q# tutorial seems friendly enough to wade into without much knowledge in the field (especially if you know C# or F#). But if you're like me you'll have about 5 tabs of reading material open beside ;)
- ianai 9y ago
  I’m missing the piece between the dwave and programming in ternary. Ie the dwave acts as a neural network - you “program it” through finding novel applications of its architecture to problems. (Its hardware being a specific form of neural network, a Hopfield network.) Ternary programming seems to be an attempt to implement general processing on top of a neural network, ignoring the relationships between the qbits.
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    I am in no way in my element with quantum computing. I'm trying to dip my toes in as an amateur. I still often get a little turned around in the [what appear to be] subtle differences between Qubit operations and ternary operations. At a naive level, they appear to be the same—three possible states: 1, 0, indeterminate. This however isn't quite true. I hope somebody who's better educated can weigh in, but it seems that a Qubit is actually flat to the user in that the user can only ever see one of two visible states at the point of observation, where with ternary operations the user can actually see one of three differing states. I'm not yet familiar with the DWave platform, but it certainly appears as if that would be a good thing to know in the coming years...
    - ianai 9y ago
      From my understanding, they define a state of the Hopfield nodes akin to some external model’s state at some point. Then the neural net “anneals” to its naturally lowest energy state. That state is then read as output of the computer. This is my very naive understanding, of course.
      - 52-6F-62 9y ago
        Okay, I had to do a bit of reading to even start to understand what you were talking about/referring to, but it sounds like you're on the right track—though I didn't get to any point in my reading where they specified the network type explicitly. Also: It sounds like the 2000Q is designed to offer API capability, but it doesn't sound like anybody runs one: https://www.dwavesys.com/software https://www.dwavesys.com/software But for now IBM and Rigetti do: http://www.davidykay.com/Cloud-Quantum-Computing-Heats-Up-as-Rigetti-Launches-API/ http://www.davidykay.com/Cloud-Quantum-Computing-Heats-Up-as... D-wave does have software available for developing on a normal machine that can also run on their systems, but I'm finding Q# a more familiar interface for an introduction. https://github.com/dwavesystems/qbsolv https://github.com/dwavesystems/qbsolv
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    There's no missing piece between the dwave and arbitrary quantum computing, dwave doesn't do that, it does a particular task (quantum annealing), to which some (but not all!) quantum algorithms can be mapped. If you want to implement arbitrary quantum algorithms, you need a proper quantum processor (like the one described in the article), not something involving dwave; it's apples and oranges; they're both fruit but not the same and not really comparable.
    - ianai 9y ago
      My gut reaction is to dismiss the dwave for that. But, it’s still a neat piece of hardware - a quantum scale hardware neural network modeled on a simplification of brain neurons. It’s just sort of a naming collision.
gdubs 9y ago
Don’t feel bad — in a recent WSJ magazine interview with Bill Gates he said, (paraphrasing), “I keep up with most of the new tech at Microsoft, but if there’s one area where the math looks like Greek to me, it’s Quantum Computing.”
- vtomole 9y ago
  The basics of quantum computing are not difficult if you know linear algebra. The state of a qubit is described using a column vector that holds complex numbers. Gate operations are performed by multiplication on the states with unitary matrices. A good introduction: http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html
  - dudus 9y ago
    That's the greek right there
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
taeric 9y ago
If it helps, try imagining what programming superscalar computers is like. :) That is, when it is ready, you really won't, for most things. Instead, you will leverage massive amount of work others have done so that your much simpler programs will work.
- ianai 9y ago
  Bah, if I had my way, I’d like to be one of those first contributors the rest gets built upon.
  - taeric 9y ago
    Fair. My point there is not to worry, then, about how to solve large problems. Quite literally worry only about the smaller building blocks. To get an idea of the useful building blocks for traditional computers, look at the circuitry that goes into manipulating numbers. Far from trivial, once you get to a certain size. And it is likely you will need the same operations even in quantum. Not just addition, mind. Rotation/shifting and other manipulations of data. I'm sure there are some new primitives, as well.
alexeldeib 9y ago
I've read a few different versions explaining the basics. I found this a useful intro, and it links to some good lecture notes as well (note that part 2 is at the bottom linked): http://davidbkemp.github.io/QuantumComputingArticle/ http://davidbkemp.github.io/QuantumComputingArticle/
swampangel 9y ago
There's an in-browser quantum computer simulator called Quirk https://hackaday.com/2018/01/24/quantum-weirdness-in-your-browser/ https://hackaday.com/2018/01/24/quantum-weirdness-in-your-br... and the author's blog explores related problems http://algassert.com/ http://algassert.com/

52-6F-62 9y ago

See, for example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-qr-intro?view=qsharp-preview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-qr-intro?vi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit Going further... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic edit: The Microsoft Q# tutorial seems friendly enough to wade into without much knowledge in the field (especially if you know C# or F#). But if you're like me you'll have about 5 tabs of reading material open beside ;)

ianai 9y ago
I’m missing the piece between the dwave and programming in ternary. Ie the dwave acts as a neural network - you “program it” through finding novel applications of its architecture to problems. (Its hardware being a specific form of neural network, a Hopfield network.) Ternary programming seems to be an attempt to implement general processing on top of a neural network, ignoring the relationships between the qbits.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  I am in no way in my element with quantum computing. I'm trying to dip my toes in as an amateur. I still often get a little turned around in the [what appear to be] subtle differences between Qubit operations and ternary operations. At a naive level, they appear to be the same—three possible states: 1, 0, indeterminate. This however isn't quite true. I hope somebody who's better educated can weigh in, but it seems that a Qubit is actually flat to the user in that the user can only ever see one of two visible states at the point of observation, where with ternary operations the user can actually see one of three differing states. I'm not yet familiar with the DWave platform, but it certainly appears as if that would be a good thing to know in the coming years...
  - ianai 9y ago
    From my understanding, they define a state of the Hopfield nodes akin to some external model’s state at some point. Then the neural net “anneals” to its naturally lowest energy state. That state is then read as output of the computer. This is my very naive understanding, of course.
    - 52-6F-62 9y ago
      Okay, I had to do a bit of reading to even start to understand what you were talking about/referring to, but it sounds like you're on the right track—though I didn't get to any point in my reading where they specified the network type explicitly. Also: It sounds like the 2000Q is designed to offer API capability, but it doesn't sound like anybody runs one: https://www.dwavesys.com/software https://www.dwavesys.com/software But for now IBM and Rigetti do: http://www.davidykay.com/Cloud-Quantum-Computing-Heats-Up-as-Rigetti-Launches-API/ http://www.davidykay.com/Cloud-Quantum-Computing-Heats-Up-as... D-wave does have software available for developing on a normal machine that can also run on their systems, but I'm finding Q# a more familiar interface for an introduction. https://github.com/dwavesystems/qbsolv https://github.com/dwavesystems/qbsolv
- PeterisP 9y ago
  There's no missing piece between the dwave and arbitrary quantum computing, dwave doesn't do that, it does a particular task (quantum annealing), to which some (but not all!) quantum algorithms can be mapped. If you want to implement arbitrary quantum algorithms, you need a proper quantum processor (like the one described in the article), not something involving dwave; it's apples and oranges; they're both fruit but not the same and not really comparable.
  - ianai 9y ago
    My gut reaction is to dismiss the dwave for that. But, it’s still a neat piece of hardware - a quantum scale hardware neural network modeled on a simplification of brain neurons. It’s just sort of a naming collision.

gdubs 9y ago

Don’t feel bad — in a recent WSJ magazine interview with Bill Gates he said, (paraphrasing), “I keep up with most of the new tech at Microsoft, but if there’s one area where the math looks like Greek to me, it’s Quantum Computing.”

vtomole 9y ago
The basics of quantum computing are not difficult if you know linear algebra. The state of a qubit is described using a column vector that holds complex numbers. Gate operations are performed by multiplication on the states with unitary matrices. A good introduction: http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html
- dudus 9y ago
  That's the greek right there
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

taeric 9y ago

If it helps, try imagining what programming superscalar computers is like. :) That is, when it is ready, you really won't, for most things. Instead, you will leverage massive amount of work others have done so that your much simpler programs will work.

ianai 9y ago
Bah, if I had my way, I’d like to be one of those first contributors the rest gets built upon.
- taeric 9y ago
  Fair. My point there is not to worry, then, about how to solve large problems. Quite literally worry only about the smaller building blocks. To get an idea of the useful building blocks for traditional computers, look at the circuitry that goes into manipulating numbers. Far from trivial, once you get to a certain size. And it is likely you will need the same operations even in quantum. Not just addition, mind. Rotation/shifting and other manipulations of data. I'm sure there are some new primitives, as well.

alexeldeib 9y ago

I've read a few different versions explaining the basics. I found this a useful intro, and it links to some good lecture notes as well (note that part 2 is at the bottom linked): http://davidbkemp.github.io/QuantumComputingArticle/ http://davidbkemp.github.io/QuantumComputingArticle/

swampangel 9y ago

There's an in-browser quantum computer simulator called Quirk https://hackaday.com/2018/01/24/quantum-weirdness-in-your-browser/ https://hackaday.com/2018/01/24/quantum-weirdness-in-your-br... and the author's blog explores related problems http://algassert.com/ http://algassert.com/