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)

Visualizing a qubit in Python

In this recipe, we will use generic Python with NumPy to create a vector and visual representation of a bit and show how it can be in only two states, 0 and 1. We will also introduce our first, smallish foray into the Qiskit® world by showing how a qubit can not only be in the unique 0 and 1 states but also in a superposition of these states. The way to do this is to take the vector form of the qubit and project it on the so-called Bloch sphere, for which there is a Qiskit® method. Let's get to work!

In the preceding recipe, we defined our qubits with the help of two complex parameters—a and b. This meant that our qubits could take values other than the 0 and 1 of a classical bit. But it is hard to visualize a qubit halfway between 0 and 1, even if you know a and b.

However, with a little mathematical trickery, it turns out that you can also describe a qubit using two angles—theta () and phi ()—and visualize the...