Visualizing the backends

Now that we have started poking at various parameters of the IBM Quantum® backends, it would be helpful to have a simple way of getting a visual overview of the quantum chips and various important parameters, such as how the qubits are interconnected, which connections are better than others, what the quality of each qubit is, and so on. Qiskit® comes with visualizations built in.

Getting ready

The file required in the following recipe can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Quantum-Computing-in-Practice-with-Qiskit-and-IBM-Quantum-Experience/blob/master/Chapter05/ch5_r4_backend_vis.py.

How to do it...

We will use three methods of the qiskit.visualization package to look over the backends: plot_gate_map(), plot_error_map(), and plot_circuit_layout(). For the last one, we also need to transpile a quantum circuit using the transpile() method to then display which qubits Qiskit® is mapping your gates to on the...