I’m a Maker and Costume Designer, Here’s Why I’m Learning Quantum Computing
By Kevin Roche, Advisory Engineer/Scientist in Magnetoelectronics and Spintronics, and IBM Quantum Ambassador
There are all sorts of things that artists can do when they incorporate new technology into their design process. What about quantum computing — what kinds of new rules can we write to create things that are more pleasing to the eye? Can we create new shapes or patterns that have been altered by the effects of quantum processing?
I’m a bit of a polymath, one who does both art and science, and have done so all my life. I have a bachelor’s in physics from UC Berkeley, but also studied life drawing and costume design, and I’m active attending and organizing science fiction conventions. Today, I work in materials science at IBM, where I specialize in spintronics, the study of incorporating the electron’s spin property into electronics. I’ve done a lot of science outreach about my work, through which I also developed an interest in robotics, building various robots of my own and incorporating robotics into my costumes. Like I said, I do a lot.
Back in 2017, a lot of different things converged. Because of my experience explaining my hobby robots to the public, I was asked to help show off IBM’s “TJBot” at the San Mateo Maker Faire, where IBM Quantum representatives were sharing the booth, and were also scheduled to give a talk. Given my knack for explaining science concepts to the public, I learned the quantum talking points and helped run the booth. I also helped fix one of their demos — a 3D printed “qubit” with a wonky switch — and we were also showing a Raspberry Pi that would send jobs to an IBM Quantum computer and then display the results with color-changing LCDs. I loved how exciting an opportunity this was, both for me to learn and explain another cool scientific concept and for others to know that anyone can program a real quantum computer.
I set out to write my own public talks about quantum computers, and decided to build my own version of the Raspberry Pi demo, learning python to build a bright handheld device that would display bright, easily-recognizable patterns that I could wave in front of an audience. That project, Quantum-Raspberry-Tie, is freely available on github, and some of it has now been referenced and folded into the Rasqberry project, which you can learn more about here. There is now a whole channel devoted to such projects, #qiskit-on-raspberry, on the Qiskit Slack community.
As a maker, I love quantum computing with Qiskit because it’s free and open-access, and the barrier to entry is really low. Of course, right now, if you tried to calculate 2+2 on a quantum device, you wouldn’t get 4 every time due to the errors in this nascent hardware. But the fact that it’s open source means that there’s a lot of potential for other makers to incorporate the strange concepts of superposition and entanglement into their own projects. And what if you had a rack of Raspberry Pis working together, all accessing a real quantum device or a quantum simulator? I hope that more folks join our qiskit-on-raspberry community, because I’d love to see what the combination of this popular maker platform and the weirdness of quantum computing can yield.
As a costume designer, I’m intrigued at the idea of incorporating quantum algorithms into patterns for printing or fabric design. Artists love using various strange ways of coming up with new shapes and color combinations, and who knows whether the quantum relationships in these algorithms can yield interference patterns that might be aesthetically pleasing. If you wrap those patterns around a body, the 3D-element and motion now changes how we register them, leading to a whole different avenue of exploration for artists and designers. Perhaps we can write rules that codify the more interesting shapes and patterns we devise. Of course, quantum computers are noisy today, but even that noise can be exploited in music or artwork.
I’m excited about all the different creative avenues that access to this weird new tool can lead to. As for me, my friends are probably waiting for me to build a quantum computer hat or something.
Read previous “Why I’m Learning Quantum Computing” Stories here, here and here, and get started with Qiskit here!
