Mentioned e.g. at:

These are two conflicting constraints:

TODO clear example of the computational problem that it solves.

Era of quantum computing before we reach physical errors small enough to do perfect quantum error correction as demonstrated by the quantum threshold theorem.

These appear to be benchmarks that don't involve running anything concretely, just compiling and likely then counting gates:

Sample implementations:

This is a quick tutorial on how a quantum computer programmer thinks about how a quantum computer works. If you know:a concrete and precise hello world operation can be understood in 30 minutes.

Although there are several types of quantum computer under development, there exists a single high level model that represents what most of those computers can do, and we are going to explain that model here. This model is the is the digital quantum computer model, which uses a quantum circuit, that is made up of many quantum gates.

Beyond that basic model, programmers only may have to consider the imperfections of their hardware, but the starting point will almost always be this basic model, and tooling that automates mapping the high level model to real hardware considering those imperfections (i.e. quantum compilers) is already getting better and better.

The way quantum programmers think about a quantum computer in order to program can be described as follows:

To operate a quantum computer, you follow the step of operation of a quantum computer:

Each time you do this, you are literally conducting a physical experiment of the specific physical implementation of the computer:and each run as the above can is simply called "an experiment" or "a measurement".

The output comes out "instantly" in the sense that it is physically impossible to observe any intermediate state of the system, i.e. there are no clocks like in classical computers, further discussion at: quantum circuits vs classical circuits. Setting up, running the experiment and taking the does take some time however, and this is important because you have to run the same experiment multiple times because results are probabilistic as mentioned below.

Unlike in a classical computer, the output of a quantum computer is not deterministic however.

But the each output is not equally likely either, otherwise the computer would be useless except as random number generator!

This is because the probabilities of each output for a given input depends on the program (unitary matrix) it went through.

Therefore, what we have to do is to design the quantum circuit in a way that the right or better answers will come out more likely than the bad answers.

We then calculate the error bound for our circuit based on its design, and then determine how many times we have to run the experiment to reach the desired accuracy.

The probability of each output of a quantum computer is derived from the input and the circuit as follows.

First we take the classic input vector of dimension N of 0's and 1's and convert it to a "quantum state vector" $\overrightarrow{q_{in}}$ of dimension $2^n$:

We are after all going to multiply it by the program matrix, as you would expect, and that has dimension $2^n\times 2^n$!

Note that this initial transformation also transforms the discrete zeroes and ones into complex numbers.

For example, in a 3 qubit computer, the quantum state vector has dimension $2^3=8$ and the following shows all 8 possible conversions from the classic input to the quantum state vector:

This can be intuitively interpreted as:

Now that we finally have our quantum state vector, we just multiply it by the unitary matrix $Q$ of the quantum circuit, and obtain the $2^n$ dimensional output quantum state vector $\overrightarrow{q_{out}}$:

And at long last, the probability of each classical outcome of the measurement is proportional to the square of the length of each entry in the quantum vector, analogously to what is done in the Schrödinger equation.

For example, suppose that the 3 qubit output were:

Then, the probability of each possible outcomes would be the length of each component squared:i.e. 75% for the first, and 25% for the third outcomes, where just like for the input:

All other outcomes have probability 0 and cannot occur, e.g.: 001 is impossible.

Keep in mind that the quantum state vector can also contain complex numbers because we are doing quantum mechanics, but we just take their magnitude in that case, e.g. the following quantum state would lead to the same probabilities as the previous one:

This interpretation of the quantum state vector clarifies a few things:

As we could see, this model is was simple to understand, being only marginally more complex than that of a classical computer, see also: quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6639/is-my-background-sufficient-to-start-quantum-computing/14317#14317 The situation of quantum computers today in the 2020's is somewhat analogous to that of the early days of classical circuits and computers in the 1950's and 1960's, before CPU came along and software ate the world. Even though the exact physics of a classical computer might be hard to understand and vary across different types of integrated circuits, those early hardware pioneers (and to this day modern CPU designers), can usefully view circuits from a higher level point of view, thinking only about concepts such as:as modelled at the register transfer level, and only in a separate compilation step translated into actual chips. This high level understanding of how a classical computer works is what we can call "the programmer's model of a classical computer". So we are now going to describe the quantum analogue of it.

Bibliography:

Communicating at a distance, from Greek "tele" for distance!

A very cool thing about telecommunication is, besides how incredibly fast it advanced (in this sense it is no cooler than integrated circuit development), how much physics and information theory is involved in it. Applications of telecommunication implementation spill over to other fields, e.g. some proposed quantum computing approaches are remarkably related to telecommunication technology, e.g. microwaves and silicon photonics.

This understanding made Ciro Santilli wish he had opted for telecommunication engineering when he was back in school in Brazil. For some incomprehensible reason, telecommunications was the least competitive specialization in the electric engineering department at the time, behind even power electronics. This goes to show both how completely unrelated to reality university is, and how completely outdated Brazil is/was. Sad stuff.