What Visualization Tools do Quantum Code Developers use

#1

General Question for anyone who develops code using PennylaneAI. What Visualization tools do you use to help you code for a Quantum Computer.

I took my Quantum Chemistry level 300 course in 1984, and have been coding for 40 years, but I can’t get my brain around how to think about coding for Quantum.

I am just going to spend a while collecting information:

  1. I like the bloch sphere, looks useful for a few qubits. or here and other places as well such as this cool one.

  2. I have seen the coded notation that looks useful, not sure what it is called

  3. The Cell Phone game Hello Quantum helps get a sense of a few of the gates.

  4. My own page at ibm quantum zoom-able symbols page more just a set of symbol definitions but thought I would include it.

I used to really enjoy graphing imaginary numbers, so I am curious why many visualizations seem to be trying to hide the imaginary part.

Also wondering if anyone has found a visualization method that would scale well with multiple Qubits.

I think a lot of work could be done in this area. Any opinions or interesting links.

#2

Hi @jerteach,

I’m afraid that I don’t use any visualization tools for coding. As you are discovering yourself, trying to visualize states and gates on multiple qubits is extremely difficult and usually not very helpful. I personally gain a better grasp by understanding the mathematics behind these objects.

The one tool that I do find helpful is to draw circuit diagrams outlining the sequence of gates that are applied in a quantum algorithm. You may have seen them already, they look like this:

image

Once you have a circuit diagram, it becomes much easier to write down the instructions to implement the corresponding algorithm. With PennyLane you can do the converse; once you have created a QNode, it is possible to draw the circuit that describes it. You can see some examples in this QAOA tutorial.

Hope that helps!

Juan Miguel

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