Programming a quantum computer
Quantum computers don’t run independently. They receive input from classical computers and provide output to classical computers. In a sense, there’s no such thing as completely independent quantum computing. All quantum computing is part of a larger technology called hybrid computing.
When you work with quantum computers, you write code that runs on a classical computer. Based on your code, the classical computer feeds instructions to the quantum computer. There are many programming platforms designed specifically for quantum computing. They include Q# from Microsoft, Cirq from Google, OpenQASM from IBM, Ocean from D-Wave, and PennyLane, which is maintained by Xanadu.
In this book, we program using Qiskit – an open source software development kit. Qiskit (pronounced KISS-kit) is part of IBM’s family of quantum computing initiatives. Using Qiskit, you can run code for quantum computers on many different devices. Some...
