Write Your First Quantum Program (Common Lisp)

medo-bear | 107 points

Hello! PhD student on quantum computing here. While it's cool that the field of QC raises excitement and there are efforts to promote QC to a more general public, it's always a little frustrating to see these approaches that, in a sense (and in my opinion), seriously underplay the difficulty and distance of the field from computer engineering. While it's true that it's an incredibly interdisciplinary field, which can be studied from a Physics, CompSci, EE, etc., perspective, it's definitely its own field, and not a new framework or programming language. I think this reflects heavily on the fact that a lot of QC programming languages peddled by the main industry players hide a lot of stuff behind opaque API calls.

The thing is (again, imho!) it wouldn't have made sense to talk about frameworks when the first classical computers appeared --- and you'd better have knowledge about the hardware and theory. (These are still a good idea to know but not really a requirement anymore.)

Likewise, I think that for the next decades, anyone who wants to meaningfully contribute to QC (rather than call a few API functions) will have to read some technical stuff (my recommendations are [1] as a semi-informal approach, [2] for a CS approach, [3] for an algorithm overview, and [4] as the reference book).

Sorry for the minor rant :)

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=97811...

[2] Ethan Bernstein, & Umesh Vazirani (1997). Quantum Complexity TheorySIAM Journal on Computing, 26(5), 1411–1473.

[3] https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030190651

[4] https://www.cambridge.org/pt/academic/subjects/physics/quant...

miguelmurca | 3 years ago

Nitpick: as a CL programmer, I shuddered when I noticed that they use SLIME from 2014. It can work, sure, but it's ancient by now!

phoe-krk | 3 years ago

Are quantum computers compatible with all not-disproven interpretations of quantum mechanics? Including unpopular ones like, e.g., local/global hidden variable theories. What I mean is, do we actually know for sure that quantum computers do what we want them to do?

throwaway8581 | 3 years ago

Not to be picky, but what are the advantages of using CL for this kind of software instead of Julia?

nahuel0x | 3 years ago

grep --use-quantum-nfa

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh | 3 years ago

OT: When I select text on this page, it drags like it is an image. It is both weird and not user friendly. I select text to help read and follow long sentences. Is this some sort of anti-copy-paste mechanism? If so, the text is in the source so it's not useful

yellowyacht | 3 years ago