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Show HN: Learn quantum programming in short, simple lessons

demo.quantumlab.cc

10 points by sounddetective 7 years ago · 8 comments

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Passiday 7 years ago

Definately a good start! But I am not sure it is accessible for a person that had no prior knowledge in the field. It appears the target audience is not assumed to have any. So it is still too complicated. The concept of qubit, gates and circuit (and other concepts) should be explained with a help of some appealing images. Plain text will not cut it.

https://demo.quantumlab.cc/courses/1/2

I don't think this is a good description of the expected output:

The function applies a Hadamard quantum gate to the supplied qubit and measures it.

Returns: A tuple of two objects representing an application of Hadamard and measurement gates on each qubits.

The description refers to the "supplied qubit", but there are no parameters.

The expected return description mentions "each qubits", but there is only one qubit to be processed.

Last, the expected return is described as "a tuple of two objects", but actually it expects the returned object be of MeasurementGate type.

This code was considered valid:

  q = GridQubit(0, 0)
  q = H(q)
  result = measure(q)   
  return result
MuncleUscles 7 years ago

Pretty neat - quantum computing has been an interest of mine for a while, but up to this point I had only watched lectures about the theory behind it, it's interesting to see how it might be done in practice. Wish there was more content though, this didn't really give me any insight about what kinds of computations might be done with this

Eridrus 7 years ago

I went through the intro. The Python exercises are flakey. Most of them didn't do anything when I clicked Run or Submit. I messed around and called the function myself and that seemed to get it to start doing something.

The presentation isn't great either. Why do I need to click on a next button every sentence?

I also don't feel like I learnt anything meaningful from the Fundamentals tutorial.

  • sounddetectiveOP 7 years ago

    Thanks, we just fixed the "Run" issue. Hope it works now.

    We wanted to start with very simple concepts for the demo to validate if there is interest in this direction and it makes sense to work further.

andrisz 7 years ago

Looks interesting and worthy of a bookmark to check it out later. However it seems that learning material could be made more quantum-computing-newbie friendly. As an example - the very first time the user is introduced to a term "quantum gate" goes like this: "In Cirq you can apply a single qubit quantum gate using the following syntax: ‘H(qubit)’.". "Cirq" and "qubit" was mentioned at this point, but I go like - "So what's quantum gate? Is that quantum operator?"

edgarsj 7 years ago

As someone who has (or better - had) no idea what is quantum computing about, I can say that this looks like an easy way to get informed and test whether you actually understand the concepts.

martinsbalodis 7 years ago

Minor point - I think that your lessons under Fundamentals 1 (I) are in the wrong order. It starts with the second lesson (2. Qubits).

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