Code Optimization for Quantum Hardware

1 points by timcooked 1 year ago | 1 comment

Like most people not living under a rock, I opened the news and saw Microsoft's announcement of Majorana 1. I need to preface this by saying yes, the announcement might've been more for investors rather than consumers. This was not a product announcement, but a way to show investors that things are being done at Microsoft to change the world. Naturally, I began thinking about how most developers may need to optimize their current codebase for the future of quantum hardware.

I have my opinions but I want to hear what everyone says about this development and what it means for programmers DTL. Will devs need to rewrite entire algorithms to align with the challenges we may face when quantum hardware gets commoditized?

gus_massa 1 year ago |

Assuming quantum hardware get's commoditized ...

Some algorithm and task are quantum computer friendly, in particular the Fast Fourier transform goes from O(N^2) to O(N logN).

Other algorithms don't get more speed from the quantum hardware. It's not magic, just that there a are a few useful interesting cases.

So, I expect to see a few dedicated libraries to run calculations in a quantum coprocesor, and a some "vectorized" language to write the glue that connect the pipes.