Work / Technology & tools

ILLUSTRATION BY THE PROJECT TWINS

HOW TO GET STARTED IN
QUANTUM COMPUTING
Tempted to try your hand at a new technique?
These tools will help you on your way. By David Matthews

T
o the untrained eye, a circuit built with Those properties empower quantum Canada, estimates that computers will need
IBM’s online Quantum Experience tool computers to solve certain classes of prob- several thousand qubits before they can
looks like something out of an intro- lem more quickly than classical computers. usefully model chemical systems.
ductory computer-science course. Chemists could, for instance, use quantum “The stage of quantum computers now
Logic gates, the building blocks of computers to speed up the identification of is something like classical computing in
computation, are arrayed on a digital canvas, new catalysts through modelling. the late 1980s,” says Sara Metwalli, a quan-
transforming inputs into outputs. Yet that prospect remains a distant one. tum-computing researcher at Keio University
But this is a quantum circuit, and the gates Even the fastest quantum computers today in Tokyo. “Most of the work done now is to
modify not the usual binary 1 or 0 bits, but have no more than 100 qubits, and are plagued prove that quantum, in the future, may have
qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum com- by random errors. In 2019, Google demon- the ability to solve interesting problems.”
puting. Unlike binary bits, qubits can exist as a strated that its 54-qubit quantum computer
‘superposition’ of both 1 and 0, resolving one could solve in minutes a problem that would Fast-moving field
way or the other only when measured. Quan- take a classical machine 10,000 years. But Still, progress is happening fast. IBM hopes to
tum computing also exploits properties such this ‘quantum advantage’ applied only to an have a 1,000-qubit machine by 2023, and quan-
as entanglement, in which changing the state extremely narrow situation. Peter Selinger, tum-computing advocates enthuse that the
of one qubit also changes the state of another, a mathematician and quantum-computing field is ripe for development. For those who
even at a distance. specialist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, want to see what the fuss is about, a growing

166 | Nature | Vol 591 | 4 March 2021

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collection of online tutorials, programming UK-based Cambridge Quantum Computing institutions can apply to become early
languages and simulators are making it easier has launched tket, with the associated pytket adopters.
than ever to dip their toes into quantum com- library. Google doesn’t sell access to its quantum
puting. Another option is Silq, a language released machines. But Markus Hoffmann, who heads
The digital logic underlying classical com- last year by a team at the Swiss Federal Insti- its quantum-computing partnerships and
puters is well known: 1 AND 0 = 0, for instance. tute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. One of programs team, says that any scientist with a
But quantum computers are much more fluid, its key advantages, says co-creator Benjamin strong proposal for an experiment that could
and researchers must come to grips with how Bichsel, involves ‘uncomputation’. The lan- be deployed on Google’s hardware should get
qubit states are expressed mathematically guage automatically resets the temporary in touch. “Based on the research impact in the
to understand how they behave. “Quantum values used by a quantum program, rather field, we will find a way to make that experi-
computing is essentially matrix vector multi- than forcing programmers to do this tedious ment happen,” says Hoffmann, who is based
plication — it’s linear algebra underneath the work manually. in Munich, Germany.
hood,” says Krysta Svore, principal manager of Somewhat less user-friendly is Quipper. Ashley Montanaro, a quantum-computing
the quantum-computing group at Microsoft Unlike Python, Quipper is not an ‘imperative’ researcher at the University of Bristol, UK, runs
Research in Redmond, Washington. language — one in which the program details his quantum programs through Amazon Web
Several online guides build up from the a series of steps that change the state of the Services, a cloud-computing platform that
basics. Physicist Michael Nielsen and soft- software, says Selinger, who is one of Quipper’s plugs into other firms’ quantum devices. It
ware engineer Andy Matuschak, both based creators. Rather, it is ‘functional’, more akin costs him around US$1 to test one quantum
in San Francisco, California, have produced a to a series of mathematical functions. “You circuit, but because researchers might want
walk-through resource called Quantum Com- never update anything, there are no variables,” to test thousands of such circuits, “the cost
puting for the Very Curious (see go.nature. Selinger says. can rack up”, he cautions.
com/3qazj2p). And IBM has created an inter- Although not immediately useful for cur-
active toolkit to accompany its Qiskit quantum rent small-scale devices, Quipper’s functional Start with simulations
language, with exercises that can be run in a nature could ultimately make it easier to math- Curious scientists can also experiment with
Jupyter computational notebook. ematically verify that a quantum program is an emulator that simulates a quantum com-
Scientists also need to wrap their heads bug-free and actually solving the problem puter on a classical machine. Microsoft’s QDK,
around quantum circuits, says Jeannette for example, has a built-in emulator that can
Garcia, senior manager for the quantum “The stage of quantum simulate a 30-qubit device on a laptop.
applications, algorithms and theory team at “I would suggest to anyone: start on an
IBM Research in San Jose, California. Running
computers now is emulator,” says Thomas O’Brien, European
from left to right and looking a bit like a musi- something like classical quantum algorithms and applications lead at
cal stave, these circuits visually represent how computing in the late 1980s.” Google’s Quantum AI research team, who is
qubits are transformed by logic gates — simi- based in Munich. “[An] emulator is much more
lar to the AND, OR and NOT gates from which predictable. It allows you to actually see the
electronic circuits are built — before being you want it to, Selinger says. But it also makes quantum states,” he says. Inspecting the state
measured to reveal their state. IBM’s Quan- the language less accessible. “If you want a of a real quantum computer just causes it to
tum Experience allows users to drag and drop non-specialist, such as a chemist, to try quan- collapse, making troubleshooting difficult,
logic gates to create their own circuits in a web tum computing, then it is best to lower the he says. And stray background heat or mag-
browser, and to run them remotely on a real threshold of entry and start with a program- netic fields can easily knock qubits out of their
quantum computer. ming language that most people are already existing state.
familiar with,” says Selinger. He suggests Qiskit But scientists should still run their programs
Lingua quantum or one of the other imperative, Python-based on a real quantum computer if they can, Mon-
From there, dedicated software frameworks languages. tanaro advises, to get used to their noisy, error-
and programming languages allow researchers Actual quantum computers are largely in the prone behaviour. “It just tells you things that
to simulate, execute and explore the quantum hands of private technology firms, who offer you just don’t get from emulation,” he says.
circuits they design. Several of these languages access to the hardware on a variety of terms. As research advances and quantum devices
were described in a 2020 review (B. Heim et al. IBM makes a five-qubit machine freely avail- improve, such headaches will diminish. But
Nature Rev. Phys. 2, 709–722; 2020). able, but to use the company’s more-powerful even then, quantum computers are unlikely to
Microsoft, IBM and Google have all created machines, research organizations need to be replace their classical counterparts. Instead,
tools — Q#, Qiskit and Cirq, respectively — that part of its Quantum Network, comprising they will sit embedded within a larger classical
draw heavily on the Python programming universities, laboratories and companies. architecture, crunching those problems for
language, and have built user-friendly devel- Although IBM doesn’t make its pricing pub- which they provide an exponential speed-up.
opment environments with ample documen- lic, it does give out ‘access awards’ to scien- Researchers still need to home in on which
tation to help coders get started. Microsoft, tists who have a “cool research idea and want problems those are, but the search is on. “This
for example, has created a full quantum devel- access to a device to try it out”, says Garcia. For is really the big question, and I think the only
opment kit (QDK), containing code libraries, instance, a team at the University of Chicago way to answer it is through exploration,” says
a debugger and a resource estimator, which in Illinois, announced last November that it Eric Johnston, co-author of Programming
checks in advance how many qubits an algo- had used IBM’s machine to explore an ‘exciton Quantum Computers (2019), who is based in
rithm will require. condensate’, a highly electrically conductive Boston, Massachusetts. “If you’re a scientist
And it’s not just the technology giants that quantum system (L. M. Sager et al. Phys. Rev. who knows some classical computing, there is
are involved. Rigetti Computing in Berke- Res. 2, 043205; 2020). so much unexplored terrain in quantum com-
ley, California, which has its own 31-qubit Microsoft offers access to other firms’ putation that you’ll never be bored.”
machine, has released a quantum-soft- quantum computers through its new Azure
ware development kit called Forest, which Quantum platform. This is at a free ‘limited David Matthews is a freelance writer based in
includes a Python library called pyQuil. And preview’ stage, says Svore, and research Berlin.

Nature | Vol 591 | 4 March 2021 | 167

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