After reading Stephen Hawking's book The Theory of Everything, my interest in Quantum Mechanics and the accompanying concepts took the top seat in what I wanted needed to know more about. Many books later, I started looking in to Quantum Computing to see how these concepts could be used in software development and was very happy to learn that I could use Python to work with Quantum Computers. In my search online, I found that IBM allows people to test their code on their actual Quantum Computers for free! The down side is that the capabilities are limited due to current hardware, but it is still great for getting started.
Enter Qiskit, a Python package from IBM to interface with their Quantum Computers or to simulate one. I wrote some functions that I found would be useful and then some that I found fun to play with. I also participated a workshop for Amazon Braket and learned how I could execute my Qiskit code on Amazon Braket devices.
To share part of my learning journey, I am leaving all that I learn open for others to learn from or use in this repository.
An example of one of the fun things: I made a Quantum Alethiometer (for fans of The Golden Compass / His Dark Materials) that you can make a statement to and it will evaluate rather the statement is true or false using the Deutsch Jozsa algorithm on a quantum computer. The concept behind the alethiometer is that you can ask it anything (if you know how) and it will give you the answer if you know how to decode it. My alethiometer function does both of those things to allow you to make your statement in plain English.
The Alethiometer says that the statement "I should eat less chocolate" is False. I accept this answer.
Unfortunately due to the limited access available to quantum computers currently, I only have 7 qubits to work with and a single letter requires 8 for the binary conversion, so it is all just on a quantum computer simulation running on my computer currently. The answers it gives aren't coming from the universe (or angels) currently, they're just coming from a computer.
Go to https://quantum-computing.ibm.com/ log in with GitHub account, click the user icon in the top right, then Account Settings, then copy the API token.
Create a .env file in this folder with the following content:
IBM_TOKEN=PASTE_YOUR_IBM_TOKEN_HERE
Run the following in the terminal:
pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt
Install the Jupyter extension for Visual Studio Code, or use whichever Jupyter Notebook editor you choose.
Open qk.ipynb, run each step from top to bottom to see outputs.
It can also be viewed in the browser by clicking here.