QCL - A Programming Language for Quantum Computers | Hacker News Reader

QCL - A Programming Language for Quantum Computers

tph.tuwien.ac.at

51 pointsjonbaer17 comments

I've been watching this series for a general introduction into the math behind quantum computing, and would recommend it: "Quantum computing for the determined" by Michael Nielsen

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1826E60FD05B44E4

See also Quipper language, which is a DSL on top of Haskell for quantum programming. [1]

[1] http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/quipper/

How long do we realistically have to wait before John Carmack rewrites Wolfenstein 3D in this?

> The current version of QCL is 0.6.3 (Dec 14 2006):

In reality, programming quantum computers is still complicated by the changing hardware. Think about it, if your goal is to do something cool with 1 or 2 bits, it doesn't make sense to build a grand architecture which will let you factor 2^25-1. In fact, when I see grad students / postdocs / professors talking about this, it's a big warning sign.

If you're interested in what could be done in the field, I would start by taking a look at QuTIP (https://code.google.com/p/qutip/), learning LabVIEW (It's effective, useful, and everywhere), or maybe becoming a topnotch Verilog coder. FPGA's are the future of QC.

I think the main question is what other systems there are out there besides D-Wave which (afaik) is mainly Python-based. http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dev-tutorial-tsp.html ie: would the larger picture be a D-Wave based "AWS-like" system that accepts to run these different languages?

DWave's Adiabatic Quantum Annealer does not run python. It is not Turing Complete. The python component is used to manually generate a matrix that corresponds to a travelling salesman problem. QCL (and Quibble) are languages designed to describe quantum programs that would actually run on a qunatum computer. What DWaves python module does is more akin to writing OpenCL code in a string and passing that to the OpenCL runtime to be compiled.

Is Java/C++/etc the punch cards of our generation? Should we start learning this to keep up?

My understanding is that (at least right now) most Quantum Computers are equivalent to ASICs; they are custom-designed to solve specific problems, or problem domains.

Quantom computers aren't replacing classical ones in the foreseeable future. At best, they will be simmilar to GPUs (and even that is a stretch).

At least this is true right now but the above could easily turn out to be one of those "None will ever use more than X bytes of ram" quotes.

If Heroku don't got it, I don't learn it.

That seems a bit self-limiting.

Damnit, that's what you get for forgetting the unicode for irony punctuation

I hope that you did not flip this around and force yourself to learn PHP and JS based on this philosophy.

Hey, come on. PHP and JS fit a niche. Just like the platypus. Remarkably stupid animal, but it exists because it fit a niche that no other animal did.

Can't we like something just because it's awesome? For both cases.

Yes we can. I respect and admire all three.

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