Chapter 4: Starting at the Ground Level with Terra
After our brief exploration of the IBM Quantum Experience® composer, and installation of IBM's Qiskit®, we are now ready to start writing quantum programs with Qiskit®. We will let go of the user interface, expanding our quantum computing journey into Python – one of the world's most popular and widespread scientific programming languages.
This chapter covers the basic requirements for building a quantum circuit with Qiskit®. We will walk through the making of a few minimalistic quantum programs that run on a local Qiskit Aer simulator and that display the results of the program in numeric as well as diagrammatic form. We will then take the leap and run the programs on actual IBM Quantum® hardware.
The theme of this chapter is quantum coin tossing, based on the rudimentary quantum program that we built in IBM Quantum Experience®. These are arguably the simplest meaningful quantum...