Qubiter’s Excellent Adventure, an Out of Body Quantum Experience with IBM

On the first week of May, 2016, IBM released, to much fanfare, on the cloud access to a 5 qubit, gate model quantum computer. And with a very nice graphical interface and accompanying simulator to boot, so you can compare the experimental results to the theoretical ones (neglecting noise). They call their service “Quantum Experience” (QE as in Queen Elizabeth, very pro British). You can join QE and use it yourself here The service is free and available to everyone.

I haven’t been blogging too much lately because I’ve very been busy programming my newest project and raising Cain with my silly jokes on Twitter, but it would be a crime if I didn’t write something about this historic for quantum computing release. So here we go.

Much has been written about QE already. Some “experimental” papers have been submitted to arXiv (for example,
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04220
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05709
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.08922
https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00267 ).
Not exactly Fermi caliber experiments, but certainly fun and educational to some. Also, some programmers have written their own simulators and put them on github
(for example, Ganesh, Corbett, Bengualid, and many others)

As my own contribution to all this lively, welcomed activity, I uploaded to Qubiter’s github repo

this script

The script illustrates how to use Qubiter to simulate QE. It outputs

a Picture file and
an English file

for a simple quantum circuit that uses all the gates and only the gates currently realizable by QE. The script also writes on the Python console the probabilities of each of the 5 qubits at the end of the evolution specified by the given initial state vector and quantum circuit.

Of course, Qubiter is capable of simulating much more complicated quantum circuits. This is like a “Hello World” exercise for it. Qubiter is so powerful that it is already capable of simulating the Matrix v0.01. Okay, I’m exaggerating just a little bit. At present, Qubiter can do quantum Fourier transforms, quantum phase estimation, and quantum chemistry (finding ground state energies of simple molecules)