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

11.1 Classical searching

In coding, “searching” is attempting to find a specific object in a collection. In Python, the collection is often a list, though it could be a NumPy array, as we shall see in section 13.1.7. The object may or may not be in the collection.

Python sets and dictionaries are optimized for search, so we focus on collections with less secondary structure for locating objects. In particular, we look at lists.

Let numbers be a list of 16 unique integers between 1 and 50 in random order.

numbers = [4, 46, 40, 15, 50, 34, 32, 20, 24, 30, 22, 49, 36, 16, 5, 2]
numbers
[4, 46, 40, 15, 50, 34, 32, 20, 24, 30, 22, 49, 36, 16, 5, 2]

The first value in the list is 4, so it does not take long to find it if we start searching from the beginning. On the other hand, 2 is the last list item, so we need to check every member of the list to confirm its presence. This is a linear...