pyquil

Alongside the development of quantum hardware, which has ever-growing qubit numbers and ever-increasing fidelities and coherence times, there’s also software that’s getting more and more sophisticated. Most quantum computer providers have their own APIs for programming their machines [1,2,3]. Python seems to be the popular choice for these APIs. But one piece of software I’ve been particularly interested in, and indeed contribute to, is Rigetti’s open source optimizing compiler called quilc [4,4’], which is a sort of a GCC/Clang for quantum computers. It’s the only open-source compiler of it’s kind. They also have a high-performance simulator [5], which is used sort of like a debugger. (Perhaps surprisingly, both are written in Common Lisp.) What is very useful about the compiler is that it is retargetable, and can compile for even IBM’s

Rigetti Quantum Computing [0] is a YC startup that actually manufactures real quantum computers that are accessible through Forest. There are a couple neat videos about the tech. [1,2] You can access the service through a Python API [3]. Disclaimer: I work there. [0] https://www.rigetti.com [1] “Lisp at the Frontier of Computation” https://youtu.be/f9vRcSAneiw [2] Rigetti talk at QIP 2017 https://youtu.be/IpoASc18P5Q [3] https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyquil

I think this is crucial. Rigetti Computing (where I work) has open-sourced several packages related to quantum programming, including pyQuil: https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyquil

Hello HN! We at Rigetti are really excited to announce and release Forest. My colleague @dangirsh and I will be here today to answer any questions that might come up about Forest and quantum computing! Some potentially HN-interesting links: pyQuil, a Python library for quantum programming: https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyquil pyQuil on RTD: https://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Grove, a collection of quantum algorithms in Python: https://github.com/rigetticomputing/grove

Rigetti's quantum computers can be operated by way of the means discussed by other commenters (toothpicks and tweezers at the oscilloscope), or can be loaded with a quantum instruction code called Quil [0], which can be written with Python using pyQuil [1,2]. The former is preferred by physicists doing physics experiments, and the latter by software engineers and application developers. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.03355.pdf [1] http://forest.rigetti.com/ [2] https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyQuil

This is great! There's a really cool ecosystem of Python tools for quantum computers that's coming out. Check them out if you'd like to learn more about quantum programming: IBM's API: https://github.com/IBM/qiskit-sdk-py Rigetti Computing's Forest: http://forest.rigetti.com/ https://github.com/rigetticomputing/pyquil ProjectQ: http://projectq.ch/ We added a really basic introduction to quantum programming into Forest that you might enjoy: http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro_to_qc.html