Programming Quantum Computers

Chapter 1. Introduction

Whether you’re an expert in software engineering, computer graphics, data science, or just a curious computerphile, this book is designed to show how the power of quantum computing might be relevant to you, by actually allowing you to start using it.

To facilitate this, the following chapters do not contain thorough explanations of quantum physics (the laws underlying quantum computing) or even quantum information theory (how those laws determine our abilities to process information). Instead, they present working examples providing insight into the capabilities of this exciting new technology. Most importantly, the code we present for these examples can be tweaked and adapted. This allows you to learn from them in the most effective way possible: by getting hands-on. Along the way, core concepts are explained as they are used, and only insofar as they build an intuition for writing quantum programs.

Our humble hope is that interested readers might be able to wield these insights to apply and augment applications of quantum computing in fields that physicists may not even have heard of. Admittedly, hoping to help spark a quantum revolution isn’t that humble, but it’s definitely exciting to be a pioneer.

Required Background

The physics underlying quantum computing is full of dense mathematics. But then so is the physics behind the transistor, and yet learning C++ need not involve a single physics equation. In this book we take a similarly programmer-centric ...