Week #44's Wednesday Evening Training: Hands-on with Quantum Computing, a practical introduction using Qiskit (part 1)

A very very very short introduction on Quantum computers

As progress on processing speed and miniaturization continues, we stuble on the phycical limits of modern binary digital electronic computers based on transistors. Using quantum physics, however, we can increase processing speed drastically. In digital computing data is encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one of two definite states (0 or 1). A quantum computer works with particles that can be in superposition. Quantum computers use Quantum Bits or Qubits, which can take on the value 0, or 1, or both simultaneously. This drastically speeds up processing. This, however, also poses some challenges... and limitations.

More on these challenges and limitations on Quantum computers in my blogpost: https://hansrontheweb.blogspot.com/2018/11/quantum-computing-introduction.html

Back to our Wednesday Evening Training on Quantum computing

This was actually our second Wednesday Evening Training on Quantum computing (for the first session, see my blogpost: https://hansrontheweb.blogspot.com/2018/08/this-weeks-wednesday-evening-training_30.html). This evening, two of our Quantum Computer champions, Julian van Velzen and Ilyas Sener, gave us a quick theoretical background and covered basic concepts such as superposition and entanglement. Julian gave us some nice demo's of Quantum computer algorithms and a code walkthrough of a Python implemented quantum algorithm to solve the Bernstein-Vazirani parity problem, without entanglement and run on real IBM Q Bluemix [ibmqx4] machine!

But there is no sitting down in the Wednesday Evening Training, using the basic conceptual understanding of Quantum computing, we started  programming ourselves using the IBM Qiskit. This is an open-source quantum computing framework for leveraging today's quantum processors in research, education, and business (see the links to resources below). At the end of the evening, we ran our first “hello world” quantum algorithm.

Interesting and game changing technology!

In the next Wednesday Evening Training session on Quantum computing, we will continue learning to develop by covering different basic quantum algorithms. Lot's of great stuff to be explored!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Here are some links…

On the basics of quantum physics:
My YouTube list on Quantum Computing: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvWecXqKP00NGuiP5UD6RoCk

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings

You 'll find post of previous sessions here: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

#wednesdayeveningtraining #capgemini #lifeatcapgemini #quantumcomputing #qiskit