Qiskit 101 — How I began my quantum computing journey?
Physics has always been the love of my life ❤!
I got introduced to quantum physics back when I was in my teens. In the movie, The Theory of Everything, in one of the dinner scenes, Hawking’s wife Jane was talking about how Hawking was trying to come up with a unified theory of the BIG THINGS, i.e. general relativity; and the small things, i.e. quantum mechanics.
This is when I became interested in black holes and quantum physics. I started studying quantum mechanics from Stanford Lagunita, in an online course. Back then I did not have a good background in math, so it was difficult to understand all the linear algebra and calculus.
A few years later, I was introduced to quantum computers. I learned that they could be the next “big thing” in the world of computing.
If we study classical computers, they work on binary digits, that is, 0 and 1. At a certain time, the computation is either a zero or one. But in the case of quantum computers, it is a superposition of 0 and 1. This is because of quantum properties of qubits, which are used to represent bits of computation in quantum computers.
What is Qiskit?
Qiskit is an open-source quantum development API, created by Qiskit.org. It is written majorly in Python and can be installed as a development package using:
pip install qiskitThe good developers and open-source contributors at Qiskit, have compiled a textbook on quantum development. With this textbook, one can learn about the basics of quantum computing using Qiskit.
The first unit of the Beta Textbook (the newer version of the textbook) covers Introduction to Quantum Computing. I studied about quantum computers, qubits, basic quantum mechanics, quantum gates, matrix transformations, quantum circuits, quantum entanglement and a searching algorithm called Grover’s algorithm.
I really loved the chapters on these individual topics. I am going to write more blogs on the Qiskit APIs and my projects!
If you also want to get into quantum computing, visit: Qiskit.
