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

Computing and Calculating

It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies …

—Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Programming languages vary in their support for different kinds of numbers and mathematical structures. It’s not unusual to see floating-point numbers and integers that are limited in size by the hardware. For many computations in the sciences and engineering, we need larger numbers than those that fit in the fixed sizes.

In this chapter, I introduce many forms of numbers and other objects with which you can calculate in Python. We look at integers, fractions, floating-point numbers, random numbers, complex numbers, qubits (quantum bits), and symbolic objects like polynomials.