Presenting the Winners of the First ICPC Quantum Computing Challenge
Today, we’re excited to announce the winners of the International Collegiate Programming Contest’s first ever Quantum Computing Challenge, powered by IBM Quantum and Qiskit.
From February 24th to 28th, nearly 240 college students and alumni from across the globe competed to build the most efficient quantum circuits for solving mathematical problems using IBM Quantum and Qiskit. While we commend each participant for their effort, three competitors rose above the rest: Adam Szady representing AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland, Pulkit Sinha from IISc Bangalore in Bangalore, India, and Zach Polansky representing the University of Rochester in the United States.
The ICPC is the “oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world,” where students compete to create the best solutions to real-world computing problems under time pressure. The IBM Quantum and Qiskit community team is excited to bring quantum computing to this audience; we recognize that the best way to learn is by doing, and have organized plenty of previous challenges such as the IBM Quantum Challenge, the Qiskit Challenge India, and the IBM Quantum Challenge: Programming for the Not-So-Distant Quantum Future. Given the excitement around quantum computing, the ICPC allowed both students and alumni to participate.
The challenge began with a mathematical introduction to quantum computing, followed by two problems asking competitors to use a quantum computer to compute a function called popcount on a small number of inputs, followed by progressively larger instances of the problem. This function is used frequently in classical computing as well as in certain quantum algorithms, such as those involved in quantum simulation. For the final problem, competitors then implemented a reflection unitary, an operator employed in quantum algorithms such as the famous Grover’s search algorithm. The IBM team selected these problems since they were appropriately complex given the time span of the contest and its target audience.
You can try out the problems on the [qiskit-community] GitHub repo, linked here.
Winning solutions weren’t just correct; participants needed to calculate them most efficiently by minimizing a cost function. These functions take into account the number of two-qubit gates, the depth, or how many consecutive quantum gates the circuit implemented on qubits, and the number of auxiliary qubits employed to solve the problem. These cost functions approximate the error rates that come from performing such calculations on real quantum hardware, where circuits with lower cost functions would have lower error rates. Graders used these cost functions to calculate a final score, where the highest scores won.
Adam Szady, alumnus of AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland, placed first with a score of 578.8. Szady has participated in competitive programming challenges since his first year of university — including IBM Quantum challenges. He started studying quantum computing in university and later at Beit Inc., the quantum algorithm startup where he now works. While he found implementing the functions familiar, optimizing the functions in order to earn the best score was a challenge.
Szady definitely had fun. He’s found that while facing challenges, people are more motivated to find better solutions, and maybe even come up with new approaches or produce new knowledge. As for what’s next, that’s sort of up to the field of quantum computing. “There’s no clear path for the future of quantum computing,” he said. “I think we need to continue focusing on doing quantum computing research and devising both low- and high-level solutions to existing problems. I hope to continue doing that with my work.”
Pulkit Sinha, a third-year student at IISc Bangalore in Bangalore, India, placed second with a score of 575.3. Sinha began with quantum computing last summer, and one of the first quantum computing books he picked up was the Qiskit Textbook. Sinha took part in the competition in order to polish his Qiskit skills and to learn more about quantum computation more generally. He has also been heavily into competitive programming for the past couple of years.
“Competitive programming forces you to devise real solutions in the moment, rather than working toward an answer at a slow pace. That’s really the fun part about it,” he said.
As an undergraduate, Sinha is still working to explore the various avenues of software development — and quantum computing is a ripe avenue for that exploration, given its position at the intersection of physics, mathematics, and computer science. He hopes to pursue a masters in computer science, and hopes that quantum computing will take a role in his future studies.
Zach Polansky, alumnus of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, placed third with a score of 559.9. While Polansky has coded since high school and programmed competitively in college, he came to this challenge with relatively little in the way of previous quantum computing experience.
“It’s a completely new mode of thinking about algorithms that required tackling these problems in a completely new way,” he said. “There was a lot of stuff I didn’t know going into the contest, and I learned by looking at examples and various papers just to see how things were done.”
Polansky works in game development, and is now interested in whether he could incorporate quantum computing into games. Quantum computing is a mystical buzzword to many, but he hopes to build a game that might serve as an introduction to help demystify the topic to new users.
Rounding out the top ten were:
4. Jeroen Winkel representing WWU Münster, scoring 550.7
5. Witold Jarnicki representing Jagiellonian University, scoring 549.4
6. Kohki Horie representing The University of Tokyo, scoring 547.9
7. Ben Zindorf representing University College London, scoring 516.0
8. Grant Barkley representing Harvard University, scoring 487.6
9. Ulrik de Muelenaere representing the University of Pretoria , scoring 481.6
10. Jan Tulowiecki representing AGH University of Science and Technology, scoring 481.1
Congratulations to all of the winners and thank you to all of those who participated! The quantum computing community is excited to see what you achieve in the future. Qiskit advocates will get notified about future engagements such as Hackathons and Challenges; if you’re interested in the program, fill out this form.
