Book Image

Dancing with Python

By : Robert S. Sutor
Book Image

Dancing with Python

By: Robert S. Sutor

Overview of this book

Dancing with Python helps you learn Python and quantum computing in a practical way. It will help you explore how to work with numbers, strings, collections, iterators, and files. The book goes beyond functions and classes and teaches you to use Python and Qiskit to create gates and circuits for classical and quantum computing. Learn how quantum extends traditional techniques using the Grover Search Algorithm and the code that implements it. Dive into some advanced and widely used applications of Python and revisit strings with more sophisticated tools, such as regular expressions and basic natural language processing (NLP). The final chapters introduce you to data analysis, visualizations, and supervised and unsupervised machine learning. By the end of the book, you will be proficient in programming the latest and most powerful quantum computers, the Pythonic way.
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
2
Part I: Getting to Know Python
10
PART II: Algorithms and Circuits
14
PART III: Advanced Features and Libraries
19
References
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
Appendices
Appendix C: The Complete UniPoly Class
Appendix D: The Complete Guitar Class Hierarchy
Appendix F: Production Notes

9.6 Quantum gates and operations

We’ve already encountered qubits twice in this book, first in the introductory section 1.11, and then again in section 5.8 where we explored quantum randomness. The remainder of this chapter expands those discussions and places them in the larger quantum computing context.

Though I’ll discuss and use qubits here, I will not repeat the mathematical foundation of complex numbers, probability, and linear algebra from other texts. [DWQ]

9.6.1 Introduction to 1-qubit gates

We represent the value or state of a qubit as two complex numbers (a, b) such that

|a|2 + |b|2 = 1 .

For example, we might have a = 1 and b = 0, or the other way around. These are important cases, and we have special names for them. (1, 0) is |0⟩, pronounced “ket-0,” and (0, 1) is |1⟩, pronounced “ket-1.”

If you are familiar...