What Visualization Tools do Quantum Code Developers use

PennyLane Development
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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.

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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

2 Likes
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Hi, yes I have the same questions and some suggestions…

The Documentation recommend Qutip.

Here you find a representation of a bloch sphere: [ Link ]

The pictures in the pennylane docs are maden with this tool… but the way to this is too cryptic for me yet… wish to get in touch with you to find a solution… This really should be a seperate tutorial explained for beginners !

I am working on a solution here : BQP-DOCS

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Hi @tjarkziehm, welcome to the forum!

Thank you for these suggestions. The bloch sphere animation is very cool.

What is the part that is still cryptic for you? What do you think the tutorial could include?