(TechRepublic) Dynamic Developer Bill Witliller here interviews one of the IBM team members who helped put the challenge together. In our conversation, Abe Asfaw, Global Lead, Quantum Education and Open Science at IBM, explain the 2020 Quantum Challenge and the challenges developers face when trying to write programs for quantum computers.
Asfaw explains the IBM Quantum Challenge is one of our many attempts to make sure that everyone becomes quantum ready, everyone can do quantum computing, can program a quantum computer. So it’s a set of four exercises that they can take with their families. And at the end of the day, what we hope to achieve from this process is that everyone is equipped to be able to program a quantum computer.
Asfaw said that the first exercise walks people through this model of computation where we show what it takes to build a quantum circuit. When you build a quantum circuit, you’re putting on quantum gates on different cubits. So we show what each quantum gate does to each qubit and we build up from there.
Asfaw references the tools that enable you to get from knowing classical computing to being a quantum ready developer. So one of the things that we do is make an open source textbook available online, and several people have been looking through this textbook. So for this challenge, what we did is take snippets of the textbook and put them in with exercises that walk people through the material, solve a problem, walk through more materials, solve the problem, and gradually you develop that terminology that you mentioned where you go from classical development to quantum development.
How & What Classic Software Developers Need to Know About Quantum Computing
