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

Defining and Using Functions

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.

—Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

We have already seen many examples of simple functions. Functions let you write and package code so that it may be used more than once. Suppose you want to print out the odd integers greater than 0 and less than 6. This works:

for i in range(6):
    if i % 2 == 1:
        print(f"{i} ", end="")
1 3 5

Instead of 6, what if you wanted to use 9 or 16 or 1,036? You do not want to repeat the above every time you change the upper bound. Instead, you code a function that is called repeatedly with different values.

def odd_numbers_less_than(n):
    # this function prints out all odd numbers greater
    # than 0 and less than n
    for i in range(n):
        if i % 2 == 1:
            print(f"{i} ", end="")
odd_numbers_less_than...