QISKit: A Swiss Army Knife for Quantum Computation

ACM TechTalks
1

Title: QISKit: A Swiss Army Knife for Quantum Computation
Date: Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Time: 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Duration: 1 hour

SPEAKER
Jay Gambetta
Manager, Theory of Quantum Computing and Information, IBM; Panelist, 50 Years of ACM AM Turing Award Celebration

RESOURCES
Registration Link
Turing 50th Celebration Page
YouTube Turing 50th

2

IBM was early with a Quantum Simulator. I registered but I never used IBM’s site because I was so busy. Since we’re having a discussion about Quantum Computation can you talk about IBM’s approach and what make’s it different. I’ve spent a lot of time reading and using Microsoft’s new released simulator on Azure but I’d still like to get a comparison of the various approaches. Here are some of my questions:

  1. Does IBM have a quantum language to program?
  2. What level of mathematics is needed to get results?
  3. How comprehensive is their SDK? I want to learn about more than just teleportation…
  4. Why does IBM feel their approach is the best?
  5. Does IBM have any Redbooks on Quantum Programming?
3

Software designers are accustomed to absolute logical control (and therefore understanding) over the result of their finally-validated100-bytes (say) module of machine-code. Quantum Computing seems more like the delightful old patch-panel analog computers for which we calibrated power-spectral noise-functions to represent some of the variables, such as wind-gusts. But we could still isolate a particular design variable for both its singular and statistical contributions. However, Quantum Computing does not seem to enable a designer to track and therefore manipulate single parameters in that way for their overall influence on even part of an entangled-system, so will validateable modular programming be possible at all?