ZX-calculus by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
How can we easily prove that that quantum circuit equals the state:
?
The naive way would be to just do the matrix multiplication as explained at Section "Quantum computing is just matrix multiplication".
However, ZX-calculus provides a simpler way.
And even more importantly, sometimes it is the only way, because in a real circuit, we would not be able to do the matrix multiplication
What we do in ZX-calculus is we first transform the original quantum circuit into a ZX graph.
This is always possible, because we can describe how to do the conversion simply for any of the Clifford plus T gates, which is a set of universal quantum gates.
Then, after we do this transformation, we can start applying further transformations that simplify the circuit.
It has already been proven that there is no efficient algorithm for this (TODO source, someone said P-sharp complete best case)
But it has been proven in 2017 that any possible equivalence between quantum circuits can be reached by modifying ZX-calculus circuits.
There are only 7 transformation rules that we need, and all others can be derived from those, universality.
So, we can apply those rules to do the transformation shown in Wikipedia:
Figure 1.
GHZ circuit as ZX-diagram
. Source.
and one of those rules finally tells us that that last graph means our desired state:
because it is a Z spider with and .
Video 1.
Working with PyZX by Aleks Kissinger (2019)
Source. This video appears to give amazing motivation on why you should care about ZX-calculus, it mentions
Bell state by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the four following states:
When unqualified as in "the Bell state", it generally just means .
The Bell states are entangled and non-separable. Intuitively, we can see that when we measure that state, the values of the first and second bit are strictly correlated. This is the hallmark of quantum computation: making up states where qubits are highly correlated to match a specific algorithmic answer, and opposed to uniformly random noise. For example, the Bell state circuit is a common hello world, e.g. it is used in the official Qiskit hello world.
Education by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the causes Ciro Santilli care the most about: motivation.
A list of complaints against education: Section "Education is broken".
How to improve education? Simple:
Whenever Ciro Santilli walks in front of a school and sees the tall gates it makes him sad. Maybe 8 year olds need gates. But do we need to protect 15 year olds like that? Students should be going out to see the world, both good and evil not hiding from it! We should instead be guiding them to the world. But instead, we are locking them up in brainwashing centers.
Video "The Purpose of Education by Noam Chomsky (2012)" puts it well, education can be either be:
He has spoken about that infinitely, e.g. from when he was thin: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo
Bibliography:
Quantum advantage by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Similar to quantum supremacy, but add the goal that the computation must be useful, i.e. make money or solve some open mathematical problem, Ciro Santilli's wife was quite excited about the possibility of finding some counter examples in number theory with quantum computers.
Cultured food by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Cultured meat by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is something worth investigating!
Video 1.
Inside the Quest to Make Lab Grown Meat by WIRED (2018)
Source.
Interviews with a few startups in the area, most of the time with Eat Just.
youtu.be/QO9SS1NS6MM?t=217 taught Ciro Santilli something he really appreciated: uncanny valley.
Gifted education by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
If school weren't bullshit, 99% of students would be in gifted education for what they truly love and are good at.
What is sad about many programs is that they are exclusivist and non scalable, selecting people some how and non scalably educating them. We need a more "here's some projects let's do them whoever can" approach to things, maybe like Google Summer of Code.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
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    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
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    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
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    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
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    Web editor
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    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
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