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Ask HN: Quantum Computation, Computers and Programming

32 points by rramadass 10mo ago

What are some good resources viz. books/papers/articles/videos/etc. to study about the three domains listed above (from Basics to Advanced)? 1) Quantum Computation: What exactly are the abstract models of computation here? Are the Classical Computation models i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_of_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_of_computation applicable? What other new models have been invented? 2) Quantum Computers: What is the Physics, Organization and Architecture of these? In classical computers you have semiconductor physics, electronic elements and voltage thresholds mapping to logical 1's and 0's. This is then used to build layers of abstractions. What are their equivalents in a quantum computer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing has a lot of info. but not quite structured for understanding. 3) Quantum Programming: A lot is mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_programming and Amazon lists a bunch of books on this topic but am not quite clear on how everything fits. Also as i understand, quantum computing/programming can be simulated on classical hardware but am not clear on the how. PS: Some detailed examples as to how quantum computers/programming actually help you solve problems which cannot be solved on classical computers would be helpful to bring everything together. Shor's algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm) is often mentioned but perhaps starting with a far simpler example would be more accessible. PPS: In particular; I would love to hear from folks who actually study/research/work in this domain regarding what they actually do, its real-world applicabilities and how to go about learning the subject.

slwvx 10mo ago
Quantum computation and information, by Nielsen and Chung
conformist 10mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computing_Since_Democritus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computing_Since_Democr...
nilslice 10mo ago
I worked at one of the quantum computing co's on their compiler stack (so pretty much pure classical compute stuff), but in order to have even a baseline understanding of the computations and programming using qubits, I had to first get a better intuition for the underlying quantum mechanics at play. This was a great introduction to the physics underpinning the computations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3bPUKo5zc&list=PLUl4u3cNGP61-9PEhRognw5vryrSEVLPr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3bPUKo5zc&list=PLUl4u3cNGP... It's long, and the subject matter is intimidating at times, but watch, re-watch, then go deep by finding papers on subjects like superposition and entanglement, which are the key quantum phenomena that unlock quantum computing. It also helps to understand a bit about how various qubit modalities are physically operated and affected by the control systems (e.g. how does a program turn into qubit rotations, readouts, and other instruction executions). Some are superconducting chips using electromagnetic wave impulses, some are suspending an ion/atom and using lasers to mutate states, or photonic chips moving light through gates - among a handful of other modalities in the industry and academia. IBM's Qiskit platform may still have tooling, simulators, and visualizers that help you write a program and step through the operations on the qubit(s) managed by the program: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit
- ktallett 10mo ago
  It does! They also still have all their summer schools up that you can go through step by step. Although I must promote Strawberry fields as I believe photonic integrated systems really is the better option.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  Very Nice! > how does a program turn into qubit rotations, readouts, and other instruction executions What is actually involved in the "instruction set" for a quantum computer? How do you "compile" to it? If i treat everything below a "logical qubit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_and_logical_qubits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_and_logical_qubits) as a black-box since from programming pov it does not(?) matter can i think of it using classical computation models? This is analogous to how one does not need to know Semiconductor Physics (which is Quantum Physics), Electronic Component Physics to understand the logical boolean framework built on top of it which is then synthesized into an instruction set to program against.
ktallett 10mo ago
QC Researcher here! 1/ Digital and analog - where digital equals qubits and analog equals photonics, diamonds, or a range of other bit replacements. 2/ Qubits and gates are the building blocks and operations in digital. Photons, diamonds, electrons, and so on are the bits in analog, you can encode any of these with information in various ways. 3/Strawberry fields for analog qc, and IBM's qiskit for digital I work on photonic integrated circuits and adapt them to remove the physical limitations on capacity, such as heat, and information loss.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  Very nice and succinct points. What are some good resources that you would recommend to study and understand the above? Also do you think QC will ever become mainstream like classical computing?
jesuslop 10mo ago
I'd do zero requisites "Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists" by Yanofsky. That is a nice base.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  Good recommendation; definitely something which might meet my needs. Thanks for the pointer.
OhMeadhbh 10mo ago
I have "Essential Mathematics for Quantum Computing" by Woody and "Non-Standard Computation" by Gramß, et al. Both were worth reading, but assumed a bit of background with "foundations of computation."
- rramadass 10mo ago
  How approachable and good is the first book? Does it marry the Mathematics to the Physics or is it simply a book on Linear Algebra etc.?
hershkumar 10mo ago
1) Generally the two models of QC are the digital/circuit model (analogous to digital logic gates, with some caveats, such as reversibility of operations, no-cloning theorem), and analog computation (tuning the parameters of a continuous-time quantum system in your lab such that the system produces useful output) 2) The physics/architecture/organization depends heavily on the type of computer being discussed. In classical computing, one "type" of computer has won the arms race. This is not yet the case for quantum computers, there are several different physical processes through which people are trying to generate computation, trapped ions, superconducting qubits, photonics, quantum dots, neutral atoms, etc. 3) There are several ways that you can simulate quantum computation on classical hardware, perhaps the most common would be through something like IBM's Qiskit, where you can keep track of the degrees of freedom of the quantum computer throughout the computation, and apply quantum logic gates in circuits. Another, more complicated method, would be something like tensor network simulations, which are efficient classical simulators of a restricted subset of quantum states. 4) In terms of research, one particularly interesting (although I'm biased by working in the field) application is quantum algorithms for nuclear/high energy physics. Classical methods (Lattice QCD) suffer from extreme computational drawbacks (factorial scaling in the number of quarks, NP-Hard Monte Carlo sign problems), and one potential way around this is using quantum computers to simulate nuclear systems instead of classical computers ("The best model of a cat is another cat, the best model of a quantum system is another quantum system") If you're interested in learning more about QC, I would highly recommend looking at Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information", it's essentially the standard primer on the world of quantum computation.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  Very Nice. Your comment meshes nicely with ktallett's comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610185 The Nielsen/Chuang book is what i see recommended everywhere and so am definitely going to get it. What others would you recommend? I had recently asked a similar question about books on "Modern Physics" (essentially Quantum Physics + Relativity) here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473352 so given your profile, what would be your recommendations? PS: You might want to add your website url to your HN profile since your Physics Notes might be helpful to a lot of other folks too. :-)
godsmokescrack 10mo ago
Standard textbook: Isaac Chuang and Michael Nielsen, "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" More mathy: A. Yu. Kitaev, A. H. Shen, M. N. Vyalyi, "Classical and Quantum Computation" A killer app: Peter Shor, "Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer" Some course notes: https://math.mit.edu/~shor/435-LN/ https://math.mit.edu/~shor/435-LN/
- rramadass 10mo ago
  These are the two books i had zeroed in on before asking here. However, how approachable is the "Classical and Quantum Computation" book? Mathematics is fine as long as it is accessible. Also how good is the explanation of analogy/comparison between concepts from "Classical Computation" vs. "Quantum Computation"? I believe this is the best way to learn this subject and hence am quite interested to know more about how this book does it.
danielam 10mo ago
The classic text is Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" [0]. Whatever else you choose to supplement this book with, it is worth having in your library. [0] https://a.co/d/aPsexRB https://a.co/d/aPsexRB
- fasterik 10mo ago
  Nielsen and Chuang has the clearest exposition of quantum mechanics I've seen anywhere. Last year I was trying to learn quantum mechanics, not necessarily quantum computation, just out of a general interest in theoretical physics. I started with physics textbooks (Griffiths and Shankar) but it only really "clicked" for me when I read the first few chapters of Nielsen and Chuang.
  - rramadass 10mo ago
    I came across A free introduction to quantum computing and quantum mechanics by Nielsen/Matuschak which seems accessible - https://quantum.country/ https://quantum.country/
michael_nielsen 10mo ago
A few comments have been kind enough to recommend the textbook I wrote with Ike Chuang. I'm glad they find it useful! It's worth noting: the book assumes a fair bit of mathematical background, especially in linear algebra. If you don't have the equivalent of an undergrad CS/math/physics degree (with some linear algebra), it may be better to start with gentler sources. One such gentler source is the free online text I wrote with Andy Matuschak -- https://quantum.country https://quantum.country. I'm sure there are others which are very good, but perhaps that's helpful! Both books focus on foundations of the field, and don't cover recent innovations -- the book with Ike Chuang is 26 years old! Still, many of the foundations have remained quite stable.
- ktallett 10mo ago
  Potentially my only opportunity to say thank you for your efforts in creating your textbook, so thank you. It helped me get to the position I am today as an academic researcher in QC although I focus on Photonics.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  Michael Nielsen himself! Thanks for the pointer to your gentler introduction. Though i did my B.Sc. Honours in Chemistry decades ago (before switching to CS) i might have to bone up on the requisite mathematics, which is fine. Given your experience in this domain; i would appreciate your take on Quantum Computing hype vs. reality? There is a lot of contradictory information like for example; The Case Against Quantum Computing - https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-case-against-quantum-computing https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-case-against-quantum-computing Do you think quantum computing will ever become mainstream? Will the "common folk" be able to program and use it with the same ease with which we do classical computers by using layers of abstractions?
__rito__ 10mo ago
I went through the comments, and one nice resource that's not on the list: Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation by Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley course) - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL74Rel4IAsETUwZS_Se_P-fSEyEVQwni7 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL74Rel4IAsETUwZS_Se_P-fSE... It's old, but really good. Another nice one is: Introduction to Classical and Quantum Computation by Wong - https://www.thomaswong.net/introduction-to-classical-and-quantum-computing-1e4p.pdf https://www.thomaswong.net/introduction-to-classical-and-qua... [PDF] These are really nice. My favorite QM book is the one by Eisberg, Resnick. I recommend it to other people. There are some nice recommendations in this thread: - Nielsen, Chuang - quantum.country by Nielsen - The IBM Qiskit ecosystem, community, platform, etc. are active and welcoming Manning Publication has some books on the theme. It's worth it to search through them.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  The Umesh Vazirani lectures look great so thanks for pointing it out. For a sampler, just watched the qubit ones and they are excellent.
kundan_s__r 10mo ago
A helpful way to learn this is to separate models, machines, and practice. For computation models, the circuit model and measurement-based computation cover most real work. Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus and Nielsen & Chuang explain why quantum differs from classical (interference, amplitudes, complexity limits). For computers/architecture, think of qubits as noisy analog components and error correction as how digital reliability is built on top. Preskill’s NISQ notes are very clear here. For programming, most work is circuit construction and simulation on classical hardware (Qiskit, Cirq). That’s normal and expected. Beyond Shor, look at Grover, phase estimation, and variational algorithms—they show how quantum advantage might appear, even if it’s limited today.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  > A helpful way to learn this is to separate models, machines, and practice. Yep, that is how i framed my question; glad to see it validated. Thanks for the pointer to Preskill's NISQ notes.
cevi 10mo ago
For learning the theory behind quantum computing, I usually recommend Watrous's lecture notes [1] - they start out by immediately giving a helpful analogy to ordinary probabilistic computation. The online tutorial [2] is a good followup, especially if you want to understand Clifford gates / stabilizer states, which are important for quantum error correction. If you have a more theoretical bent, you may enjoy learning about the ZX-calculus [3] - I found this useful for understanding how measurement-based quantum computing is supposed to work. [1] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf [2] https://qubit.guide/ https://qubit.guide/ [3] https://zxcalculus.com/ https://zxcalculus.com/
- rramadass 10mo ago
  Thanks for the pointers. hershkumar pointed to Watrous' book so the notes you point to might be a good introduction to the book itself. I didn't know of "ZX-calculus" so that goes from my unknown-unknowns to known-unknowns and so there a bunch of reading to be done there too.
nudgeee 10mo ago
Check out 1blue3brown’s excellent YouTube video lesson on quantum computing and Grover’s algorithm: https://youtu.be/RQWpF2Gb-gU https://youtu.be/RQWpF2Gb-gU Goes through qubits, state vectors and Grovers algorithm in a highly visual and intuitive fashion. Doesn’t discuss the underlying quantum mechanics in depth, but does mention and link out to resources for the interested viewer to delve deeper.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  Didn't know 3blue1brown had some videos on Quantum Computing so thanks for the pointer.

32 points by rramadass 10mo ago

slwvx 10mo ago

Quantum computation and information, by Nielsen and Chung

conformist 10mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computing_Since_Democritus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computing_Since_Democr...

nilslice 10mo ago

I worked at one of the quantum computing co's on their compiler stack (so pretty much pure classical compute stuff), but in order to have even a baseline understanding of the computations and programming using qubits, I had to first get a better intuition for the underlying quantum mechanics at play. This was a great introduction to the physics underpinning the computations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3bPUKo5zc&list=PLUl4u3cNGP61-9PEhRognw5vryrSEVLPr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3bPUKo5zc&list=PLUl4u3cNGP... It's long, and the subject matter is intimidating at times, but watch, re-watch, then go deep by finding papers on subjects like superposition and entanglement, which are the key quantum phenomena that unlock quantum computing. It also helps to understand a bit about how various qubit modalities are physically operated and affected by the control systems (e.g. how does a program turn into qubit rotations, readouts, and other instruction executions). Some are superconducting chips using electromagnetic wave impulses, some are suspending an ion/atom and using lasers to mutate states, or photonic chips moving light through gates - among a handful of other modalities in the industry and academia. IBM's Qiskit platform may still have tooling, simulators, and visualizers that help you write a program and step through the operations on the qubit(s) managed by the program: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit https://www.ibm.com/quantum/qiskit

ktallett 10mo ago
It does! They also still have all their summer schools up that you can go through step by step. Although I must promote Strawberry fields as I believe photonic integrated systems really is the better option.
rramadass 10mo ago
Very Nice! > how does a program turn into qubit rotations, readouts, and other instruction executions What is actually involved in the "instruction set" for a quantum computer? How do you "compile" to it? If i treat everything below a "logical qubit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_and_logical_qubits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_and_logical_qubits) as a black-box since from programming pov it does not(?) matter can i think of it using classical computation models? This is analogous to how one does not need to know Semiconductor Physics (which is Quantum Physics), Electronic Component Physics to understand the logical boolean framework built on top of it which is then synthesized into an instruction set to program against.

ktallett 10mo ago

QC Researcher here! 1/ Digital and analog - where digital equals qubits and analog equals photonics, diamonds, or a range of other bit replacements. 2/ Qubits and gates are the building blocks and operations in digital. Photons, diamonds, electrons, and so on are the bits in analog, you can encode any of these with information in various ways. 3/Strawberry fields for analog qc, and IBM's qiskit for digital I work on photonic integrated circuits and adapt them to remove the physical limitations on capacity, such as heat, and information loss.

rramadass 10mo ago
Very nice and succinct points. What are some good resources that you would recommend to study and understand the above? Also do you think QC will ever become mainstream like classical computing?

jesuslop 10mo ago

I'd do zero requisites "Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists" by Yanofsky. That is a nice base.

rramadass 10mo ago
Good recommendation; definitely something which might meet my needs. Thanks for the pointer.

OhMeadhbh 10mo ago

I have "Essential Mathematics for Quantum Computing" by Woody and "Non-Standard Computation" by Gramß, et al. Both were worth reading, but assumed a bit of background with "foundations of computation."

rramadass 10mo ago
How approachable and good is the first book? Does it marry the Mathematics to the Physics or is it simply a book on Linear Algebra etc.?

hershkumar 10mo ago

1) Generally the two models of QC are the digital/circuit model (analogous to digital logic gates, with some caveats, such as reversibility of operations, no-cloning theorem), and analog computation (tuning the parameters of a continuous-time quantum system in your lab such that the system produces useful output) 2) The physics/architecture/organization depends heavily on the type of computer being discussed. In classical computing, one "type" of computer has won the arms race. This is not yet the case for quantum computers, there are several different physical processes through which people are trying to generate computation, trapped ions, superconducting qubits, photonics, quantum dots, neutral atoms, etc. 3) There are several ways that you can simulate quantum computation on classical hardware, perhaps the most common would be through something like IBM's Qiskit, where you can keep track of the degrees of freedom of the quantum computer throughout the computation, and apply quantum logic gates in circuits. Another, more complicated method, would be something like tensor network simulations, which are efficient classical simulators of a restricted subset of quantum states. 4) In terms of research, one particularly interesting (although I'm biased by working in the field) application is quantum algorithms for nuclear/high energy physics. Classical methods (Lattice QCD) suffer from extreme computational drawbacks (factorial scaling in the number of quarks, NP-Hard Monte Carlo sign problems), and one potential way around this is using quantum computers to simulate nuclear systems instead of classical computers ("The best model of a cat is another cat, the best model of a quantum system is another quantum system") If you're interested in learning more about QC, I would highly recommend looking at Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information", it's essentially the standard primer on the world of quantum computation.

rramadass 10mo ago
Very Nice. Your comment meshes nicely with ktallett's comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610185 The Nielsen/Chuang book is what i see recommended everywhere and so am definitely going to get it. What others would you recommend? I had recently asked a similar question about books on "Modern Physics" (essentially Quantum Physics + Relativity) here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473352 so given your profile, what would be your recommendations? PS: You might want to add your website url to your HN profile since your Physics Notes might be helpful to a lot of other folks too. :-)

godsmokescrack 10mo ago

Standard textbook: Isaac Chuang and Michael Nielsen, "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" More mathy: A. Yu. Kitaev, A. H. Shen, M. N. Vyalyi, "Classical and Quantum Computation" A killer app: Peter Shor, "Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer" Some course notes: https://math.mit.edu/~shor/435-LN/ https://math.mit.edu/~shor/435-LN/

rramadass 10mo ago
These are the two books i had zeroed in on before asking here. However, how approachable is the "Classical and Quantum Computation" book? Mathematics is fine as long as it is accessible. Also how good is the explanation of analogy/comparison between concepts from "Classical Computation" vs. "Quantum Computation"? I believe this is the best way to learn this subject and hence am quite interested to know more about how this book does it.

danielam 10mo ago

The classic text is Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" [0]. Whatever else you choose to supplement this book with, it is worth having in your library. [0] https://a.co/d/aPsexRB https://a.co/d/aPsexRB

fasterik 10mo ago
Nielsen and Chuang has the clearest exposition of quantum mechanics I've seen anywhere. Last year I was trying to learn quantum mechanics, not necessarily quantum computation, just out of a general interest in theoretical physics. I started with physics textbooks (Griffiths and Shankar) but it only really "clicked" for me when I read the first few chapters of Nielsen and Chuang.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  I came across A free introduction to quantum computing and quantum mechanics by Nielsen/Matuschak which seems accessible - https://quantum.country/ https://quantum.country/

michael_nielsen 10mo ago

A few comments have been kind enough to recommend the textbook I wrote with Ike Chuang. I'm glad they find it useful! It's worth noting: the book assumes a fair bit of mathematical background, especially in linear algebra. If you don't have the equivalent of an undergrad CS/math/physics degree (with some linear algebra), it may be better to start with gentler sources. One such gentler source is the free online text I wrote with Andy Matuschak -- https://quantum.country https://quantum.country. I'm sure there are others which are very good, but perhaps that's helpful! Both books focus on foundations of the field, and don't cover recent innovations -- the book with Ike Chuang is 26 years old! Still, many of the foundations have remained quite stable.

ktallett 10mo ago
Potentially my only opportunity to say thank you for your efforts in creating your textbook, so thank you. It helped me get to the position I am today as an academic researcher in QC although I focus on Photonics.
rramadass 10mo ago
Michael Nielsen himself! Thanks for the pointer to your gentler introduction. Though i did my B.Sc. Honours in Chemistry decades ago (before switching to CS) i might have to bone up on the requisite mathematics, which is fine. Given your experience in this domain; i would appreciate your take on Quantum Computing hype vs. reality? There is a lot of contradictory information like for example; The Case Against Quantum Computing - https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-case-against-quantum-computing https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-case-against-quantum-computing Do you think quantum computing will ever become mainstream? Will the "common folk" be able to program and use it with the same ease with which we do classical computers by using layers of abstractions?

__rito__ 10mo ago

I went through the comments, and one nice resource that's not on the list: Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation by Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley course) - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL74Rel4IAsETUwZS_Se_P-fSEyEVQwni7 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL74Rel4IAsETUwZS_Se_P-fSE... It's old, but really good. Another nice one is: Introduction to Classical and Quantum Computation by Wong - https://www.thomaswong.net/introduction-to-classical-and-quantum-computing-1e4p.pdf https://www.thomaswong.net/introduction-to-classical-and-qua... [PDF] These are really nice. My favorite QM book is the one by Eisberg, Resnick. I recommend it to other people. There are some nice recommendations in this thread: - Nielsen, Chuang - quantum.country by Nielsen - The IBM Qiskit ecosystem, community, platform, etc. are active and welcoming Manning Publication has some books on the theme. It's worth it to search through them.

rramadass 10mo ago
The Umesh Vazirani lectures look great so thanks for pointing it out. For a sampler, just watched the qubit ones and they are excellent.

kundan_s__r 10mo ago

A helpful way to learn this is to separate models, machines, and practice. For computation models, the circuit model and measurement-based computation cover most real work. Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus and Nielsen & Chuang explain why quantum differs from classical (interference, amplitudes, complexity limits). For computers/architecture, think of qubits as noisy analog components and error correction as how digital reliability is built on top. Preskill’s NISQ notes are very clear here. For programming, most work is circuit construction and simulation on classical hardware (Qiskit, Cirq). That’s normal and expected. Beyond Shor, look at Grover, phase estimation, and variational algorithms—they show how quantum advantage might appear, even if it’s limited today.

rramadass 10mo ago
> A helpful way to learn this is to separate models, machines, and practice. Yep, that is how i framed my question; glad to see it validated. Thanks for the pointer to Preskill's NISQ notes.

cevi 10mo ago

For learning the theory behind quantum computing, I usually recommend Watrous's lecture notes [1] - they start out by immediately giving a helpful analogy to ordinary probabilistic computation. The online tutorial [2] is a good followup, especially if you want to understand Clifford gates / stabilizer states, which are important for quantum error correction. If you have a more theoretical bent, you may enjoy learning about the ZX-calculus [3] - I found this useful for understanding how measurement-based quantum computing is supposed to work. [1] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf [2] https://qubit.guide/ https://qubit.guide/ [3] https://zxcalculus.com/ https://zxcalculus.com/

rramadass 10mo ago
Thanks for the pointers. hershkumar pointed to Watrous' book so the notes you point to might be a good introduction to the book itself. I didn't know of "ZX-calculus" so that goes from my unknown-unknowns to known-unknowns and so there a bunch of reading to be done there too.

nudgeee 10mo ago

Check out 1blue3brown’s excellent YouTube video lesson on quantum computing and Grover’s algorithm: https://youtu.be/RQWpF2Gb-gU https://youtu.be/RQWpF2Gb-gU Goes through qubits, state vectors and Grovers algorithm in a highly visual and intuitive fashion. Doesn’t discuss the underlying quantum mechanics in depth, but does mention and link out to resources for the interested viewer to delve deeper.

rramadass 10mo ago
Didn't know 3blue1brown had some videos on Quantum Computing so thanks for the pointer.