Current “NISQ” quantum computers often produce errors when measurements are taken or gating operations are applied, and it is very costly in every sense of the term to deal with them. The ‘N’ in NISQ refers to “noisy; a reference to the fact that they are not capable of error correction. High error rates are […]
I recently recorded a podcast on this topic, and provided the obvious answer: because they will be able to do things that conventional computers can never do. I offered huge numbers to convey the potential, and analogies to illustrate the key differences, since the math required to really understand quantum computing is not compatible with […]
Welcome back for another look at the basics of quantum computer programming. We’re going to continue to use IBM’s excellent programming framework called Qiskit, and Jupyter notebooks to demonstrate with the usual disclaimer that you can code this without the notebook, and the same ideas can be realized in any quantum programming language. If you […]
In the previous post we started to explain how to understand quantum computing from a computer science perspective, even without knowing the underlying quantum mechanics. We did so by explaining that you can consider everything in terms of the math, and we began the process of explaining what happened in the quantum entanglement program we […]
I won’t pretend to understand the physics of quantum mechanics, it baffles me to be honest. I only know the words that the physics people use to describe what happens. My limited understanding of quantum computing comes purely from a computer science perspective, so that’s all I can try to share. A quantum bit, or […]
We ran our quantum enatnglement program on a simulator in the previous post, so it’s pretty obvious what we need to do now. Qiskit is made for interacting with IBM’s quantum resources, so this is going to be easy. Let’s get started! Qiskit has four main parts: Aer, Aqua, Terra, and Ignis. It is fashionable […]
Qiskit is IBM’s open source, quantum computing environment for Python. We can use Qiskit to write programs to run in our local environment and run them on a simulator. We can also run them on IBM’s quantum computing resources via the IBM Q project. This currently includes six 5-qubit machines and one 14-qubit machine. First […]
IBM has quantum computers online and available for the general public to use for free. We’re going to look at interacting with them through the online interface, then we’ll dive in and take a look at writing and running programs using their Python framework called Qiskit. There are other great frameworks out there to use, […]
Did Google do something amazing, again? Should we even care? Is this the beginning of the end? Do we need to worry about quantum computers breaking our encryption? For the answers to these and a down-to-earth explanation of what it all means, please read on. First of all we don’t know if Google did indeed […]