These Amazing Quantum Computing Ideas Came Out Of Our Landmark Qiskit Hackathon Global

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Senior Technical Writer, Qiskit

Good ideas can come from anywhere if you give it enough time — especially when you have dozens of people around the world trying to create hacks using quantum computers.

Earlier this month, participants from around the world took part in the Qiskit Hackathon Global, our first 24-hour virtual hackathon meant to recreate the excitement and constraints of an in-person hackathon without people having to gather physically. Participants exchanged thousands of messages and video chatted for a collective 216 hours, and were able to push the limits of quantum computing from their homes using the Qiskit open source software development kit for quantum computers.

We think that this event set the standard for virtual hackathons, not only in how well the event went, but in the quality of submissions. Participants created games, developed research paper-worthy ideas, and even built a joke-generating discord bot that you can install in your own discord servers. Most importantly, participants built and strengthened the quantum community.

“It was an honor to be a part of this hackathon, because I met super excellent Qiskitters I never imagined I’d meet,” said hackathon mentor Soyoung Shin, who worked late into the night during all four days of the event. She hopes to meet more Qiskitters from Korea, and hopes to further spread Qiskit there.

Here are some of the innovative projects that came out of the event:

QiskitFlow

Shashwat Shukla, Solomon Uriri, Mohamed Yassine Ferjani, and Iskandar Sitdikov saw a need for tools that manage quantum experiments. They worried that early-day quantum development could incur technical debt, meaning that without ways to track experiments, quick solutions on today’s limited devices might require a lot of unexpected code rewriting in the future.

The team developed QiskitFlow to make experiments on quantum computers more reproducible, easy to share in an understandable way with colleagues, and easy to track, said Sitdikov. “The end goal is to help quantum community conduct research and development in a more organized and transparent manner,” he said.

QiskitFlow consists of four components. The first is a library providing ways to annotate code and save arbitrary metrics, parameters, or other elements of the quantum program. The second is a command line interface in order to track and list quantum experiments you may have conducted, share them to a remote server, or recall information from them. The third is a backend server that stores experiment information and files. The final element is a user interface to view, search, re-run, share, and link experiments.

Sitdikov said that he’s working on a detailed roadmap for the future of the project, and that the first stable version will be released shortly. You can find him on the Qiskit Slack if you have questions.

OrQIStra

Rohit Chaurasiya, Shek Lun Leung, Cynthia Rios, Quentin Sieredzki, and Suyeon Park teamed up to figure out how they could translate a quantum circuit into a musical output, complete with a song file and sheet music. They hope that their project, OrQIStra, will be a useful way to get younger audiences excited about quantum computing and quantum information.

Each qubit in the quantum orchestra represents a musical instrument. The applet first applies a Hadamard gate to each qubit, and users select quantum gates as instructions to those instruments to write the score. Then, OrQIStra runs the circuit 1024 times and uses Qiskit’s get_counts() function to find the probability of returning each state with its respective amplitude. These values are assigned to a set of notes using conditional statements, and then translated to the song file and sheet music.

So, is a real orchestra going to play a score composed on a quantum computer? Maybe not yet. “As we continue to work together to improve on what we’ve created, I think that there’s a lot of potential,” said Rios. “Many amazing large-scale efforts have been made to introduce more people to quantum computing, but there’s still a lot more we can do. Introducing a fun game that ties circuit building to music will hopefully inspire a new audience to look into the field.”

The Entangled States Game

Another team tried to tackle quantum education with a more traditional game, called Entangled States. Nick Singstock, Spencer Moore, and Elies Gil-Fuster noticed that there have been several attempts to develop games to teach quantum computing, but these games often falter when dealing with all of the amplitudes of a multi-qubit wavefunction simultaneously. The team tried to fill this hole by building a game that visually represents all of these complex numbers and shows off how they change when various quantum gates are applied to the circuit, explained Gil-Fuster.

The game begins with players receiving an arbitrary initial qubit state with n qubits, and therefore 2^n complex numbers, represented as rods pointing in various directions in space. Players attempt to get a final n-qubit state, in essence using gates to de-tangle the mess of rods.

This game mechanic gives a visual representation of the complexity of quantum states, and how just adding gates can change those states. This gives players a more natural feel for quantum computing and how quantum operations actually work. The team used the Unreal engine, plus a C++ version of Qiskit called MicroQiskit, so the game could run on any sort of device. They hope to release a mobile app of the game soon.

Giles-Fuster said that these kinds of educational projects are important for bringing society closer to research. More people learning quantum means a wider and more diverse talent pool joining the field — but it also means more eyes to help tackle ethical problems that inevitably arise from a powerful new technology.

Quantum Dad Joke Discord Bot

The Quantum Ugly Ducklings, consisting of Rochisha Agarwal, Dayeong Kang, Rana Prathap Mukthavaram, Kathrin König, and Hyorin Kim, tasked themselves with building a random number generator based on the noise generated by quantum randomness, available over the IBM Cloud. Random number generators are useful across industries, for simulations, procedural generation of games, cryptography… and to build a discord bot that tells random dad jokes.

The team made various attempts at developing random noise. They began with a basic noise model and mapped it with the Qasm simulator. Then, they tested this circuit on a real device. These results were random, but not quite as random as the simulators. Finally, they used Qiskit Pulse to put a qubit into superposition and then wait a little bit so that it would dephase, thus adding randomness as it loses its quantum information. Dephasing is a problem with today’s quantum computers, but useful when trying to generate random numbers.

Random numbers are no fun without something random to do with them, so the team developed a bot that used the random numbers to select and post a random dad joke. You can add the Qadjoke bot to your own discord server by clicking here.

You might think that nobody really needs a bot telling random quantum jokes, said König, but this is just a simple idea to show how random noise can be used. “Even though it still is not as random as we love it to be, it is a start. We showed that noise can also be useful, and with further investigation, we could propose a real random number generator which can also be used in cryptography or simulations.”

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These are only half of the nine amazing projects that Qiskitters devised. One team built tools to integrate quantum computing into visual effects for creating real-time video art pieces. Another built a formalism to learn quantum chemistry more simply. One team wrote code to better implement the quantum volume experiment, one wrote a compiler for turning classical Bayesian networks into quantum circuits to run on Qiskit, and one wrote a program that can prepare the all-important Dicke States used in the well-known QAOA algorithm.

All these amazing ideas just go to show that the hackathon is alive and well in the quantum community. Qiskitters aren’t going to let the fact that they’re at home, and that their bed is tantalizingly close, get in the way of creating something amazing.

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