What this book covers
Chapter 1, Exploring the IBM Quantum Experience, will be your guide to the IBM Q Experience dashboard. This chapter will describe the layout and what each section in the dashboard means. The dashboard might alter over time, but the basic information should still be available to you.
Chapter 2, Circuit Composer – Creating a Quantum Circuit, will help you learn about Circuit Composer. This chapter will outline the user interface that will assist you in learning about quantum circuits, the qubits, and their gates that are used to perform operations on each qubit.
Chapter 3, Creating Quantum Circuits Using Quantum Lab Notebooks, will help you learn how to create circuits using the Notebook with the latest version of Qiskit already installed on the IBM Quantum Experience. You will learn how to save, import, and leverage existing circuits without having to install anything on your local machine.
Chapter 4, Understanding Basic Quantum Computing Principles, will help you learn about the basic quantum computing principles used by the IBM Quantum systems, particularly, superposition, entanglement, and interference. These three properties, often used together, serve as the base differentiators that separate quantum systems from classical systems.
Chapter 5, Understanding the Quantum Bit (Qubit), will help you learn about the basic fundamental component of a quantum system, the quantum bit or qubit, as it is often called. After reading this chapter, you will understand the basis states of a qubit, how they are measured, and how they can be visualized both mathematically and graphically.
Chapter 6, Understanding Quantum Logic Gates, will help you learn how to perform operations on a qubit. These operations are often referred to as quantum gates. This chapter will enable you, via the IBM Quantum Experience, to get to grips with the operations that each of these quantum gates performs on a qubit and the results of each of those operations. Examples of the quantum principles such as reversibility, which is a core principle for all quantum gates, will be included.
Chapter 7, Introducing Qiskit and its Elements, will help you learn about Qiskit and all of its libraries that can help you develop and implement various quantum computing solutions. Qiskit is composed of four elements, each of which has a specific functionality and role that can be leveraged based on the areas you wish to experiment in. The elements are Terra (Earth), Aer (Air), Ignis (Fire), and Aqua (Water). This chapter will also discuss how to contribute to each of the elements and how to install it locally on your machine.
Chapter 8, Programming with Qiskit Terra, will help you learn about the basic foundational element, Terra. Terra is the base library upon which all the other elements of Qiskit are built. Terra allows a developer to code the base of an algorithm to the specific operator on a qubit. This is analogous to assembly language with just a slightly easier set of library functions. It will also include a section on the Pulse library, which allows you to create pulse schedules to manipulate the quantum qubits via the hardware.
Chapter 9, Monitoring and Optimizing Quantum Circuits, will help you learn how to monitor the job requests sent to either the simulator or the quantum computers on the IBM Quantum Experience. Optimization features will also be covered here to allow you to leverage many of the existing optimization features included in the Qiskit libraries or to create your own custom optimizers.
Chapter 10, Executing Circuits Using Qiskit Aer, will help you learn about Qiskit Aer, a high-performance framework that you will use to simulate your circuits on various optimized simulator backends. You will learn what the differences are between the four various simulators of Qasm, State vector, Unitary, and Pulse, and what functionality each one exhibits. Aer also contains tools you can use to construct noise models, should you need to perform some research to reproduce errors due to noise.
Chapter 11, Mitigating Quantum Errors Using Ignis, will help you learn about the various errors that currently affect experiments on read devices, such as relaxation and decoherence, so you can design quantum error correction codes. You will also learn about readout error mitigation, which is a way to mitigate the readout errors returned from a quantum computer.
Chapter 12, Learning about Qiskit Aqua, will, in essence, pull everything together so that end users such as researchers and developers from the various domains of chemistry, machine learning, finance, optimization, and more can run their computations on a quantum computer system without having to know all the inner workings. Aqua is the tool connected to quantum algorithms that has been created to do just that. You will learn how to extend your classical application to include running a quantum algorithm.
Chapter 13, Understanding Quantum Algorithms, will dig into some basic algorithms using the IBM Quantum Experience Composer. This chapter will start with some simple algorithms that illustrate the advantages of superposition and entanglement, such as Bell's state theorem, and extends into some more common algorithms to solve some problems that illustrate uses of superposition and entanglement such as Deutsch-Josza and a few others, each of which provides some variance to the different algorithm types.
Chapter 14, Applying Quantum Algorithms, describes the various quantum computing properties and algorithms used to create some of the more well-known algorithms such as Quantum Amplitude Estimation, Variational Quantum Eigensolvers, and Shor's algorithm.
Appendix A, Resources, will help you get familiar with all the available resources in the IBM Quantum Experience and Qiskit community. These resources that have been contributed either by the Qiskit open source community, or the IBM Quantum research teams themselves. The information is laid out so anyone with basic to expert-level knowledge can jump in and start learning. There is a full quantum course, textbook, and Slack community that you can connect to in order to extend your learning and collaborate with others.
Assessments contains the answers to the questions asked in the chapters.