Book Image

Quantum Computing in Practice with Qiskit® and IBM Quantum Experience®

By : Hassi Norlen
5 (1)
Book Image

Quantum Computing in Practice with Qiskit® and IBM Quantum Experience®

5 (1)
By: Hassi Norlen

Overview of this book

IBM Quantum Experience® is a leading platform for programming quantum computers and implementing quantum solutions directly on the cloud. This book will help you get up to speed with programming quantum computers and provide solutions to the most common problems and challenges. You’ll start with a high-level overview of IBM Quantum Experience® and Qiskit®, where you will perform the installation while writing some basic quantum programs. This introduction puts less emphasis on the theoretical framework and more emphasis on recent developments such as Shor’s algorithm and Grover’s algorithm. Next, you’ll delve into Qiskit®, a quantum information science toolkit, and its constituent packages such as Terra, Aer, Ignis, and Aqua. You’ll cover these packages in detail, exploring their benefits and use cases. Later, you’ll discover various quantum gates that Qiskit® offers and even deconstruct a quantum program with their help, before going on to compare Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) and Universal Fault-Tolerant quantum computing using simulators and actual hardware. Finally, you’ll explore quantum algorithms and understand how they differ from classical algorithms, along with learning how to use pre-packaged algorithms in Qiskit® Aqua. By the end of this quantum computing book, you’ll be able to build and execute your own quantum programs using IBM Quantum Experience® and Qiskit® with Python.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Running Shor's algorithm as an Aqua function

Another one of the real luminaries of quantum computing algorithms is Peter Shor's algorithm dating back to 1984, in which he proved that with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, you can prime factorize really large integers. This is important not only from an academic point of view but also because, for example, factorizing really large (thousands of digits) numbers into constituent prime numbers is the core behind today's RSA encryption that is used to secure online transactions, from banking and social media to the computers built into your car.

At the point when these sufficiently large quantum computers enter the stage, crypto keys that would take weeks, months, years, and longer to break can theoretically be broken in a matter of minutes.

To level-set our expectations here, running Shor's algorithm on today's NISQ machines is more of an academic interest. As you will notice, the Shor circuits tend...