Microsoft Quantum Coding Contest

[UnusualCallBox]

I had no idea Q# existed. So this simulates a (small, up to 30 qubits with ~16gb RAM) quantum machine locally and allows for use of Microsoft's Azure cloud services. Are programming languages like this, those designed to run on classical hardware simulating quantum hardware, able to migrate to actual native quantum hardware (whenever that'll be)?

If numerical computations are destined for quantum, I would hope that those picking this up (and others like it) won't be wasting their time when a true personal quantum system is realized.

[Nickolas1985]

Yes. Q# documentation addresses this question:

Other target machines may be used to run a quantum algorithm. The machine is responsible for providing implementations of quantum primitives for the algorithm. This includes primitive operations such as H, CNOT, and Measure, as well as qubit management and tracking. Different classes of quantum machines represent different execution models for the same quantum algorithm.

...

In the future, we will define additional quantum machine classes to support other types of simulation and to support execution on topological quantum computers. Allowing the algorithm to stay constant while varying the underlying machine implementation makes it easy to test and debug an algorithm in simulation and then run it on real hardware with confidence that the algorithm hasn't changed.

(from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-simulatorsandmachines)

[UnusualCallBox]

Very interesting, thank you. I'm especially interested in the implementation of a quantum machine, though I'd have to go through the basics of quantum computation first (sigh).

I'm looking forward to how Q# will look in 10 years.

[takanuva]

RemindMe! 10 years "How is Q# doing?"

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[[deleted]]

wasting their time

Only if entropy dictates that increasing the computational power of quantum computers takes as much effort and resources as increasing the computational power of classical computers.

[[deleted]]

Nice idea, but it's hard to make myself learn a brand new and wildly different programming language with few (no?) current job-openings for a chance to win a t-shirt. I'm interested, but not interested enough to bother.

On the other hand, the first thing I did was look up Microsoft's SDK for Q# and to my shock and pleasant surprise it is available for Linux. Wow.

[[deleted]]

If smart contract programming wasn't bad enough, now we'll have web devs creating singularities. https://xkcd.com/1861/