Quantum Computing Foundations Examples

Andy Dolan | Senior Security Engineer | CableLabs

This repository provides code examples that illustrate basic operations with IBM's Qiskit for creating applications to be run on quantum computers. The Qiskit library is Python-based, and the examples are run locally via Qiskit's simulators. These examples were referenced in the member/vendor webinar produced by CableLabs on quantum computing foundations in September of 2023.

The examples are contained in the following notebooks:

• Basics.ipynb: Simple invocations of Qiskit API calls to establish and manipulate Qubit states.
• Quantum Gates.ipynb: Manual computations of a quantum circuit using the matrix representations of the gates that make it up.
• Applications.ipynb: A high-level review of the Deutsch and Deutsch-Jozsa algorithms, with implementations of the circuits and examples in Qiskit.

Getting Started

Run with Docker Compose

A Docker image of the notebooks and the dependencies needed to run them is provided for a convenient way to jump right into the code. The simplest way to do so is to use docker compose to instantiate a notebook server with the proper port exposed.

To run the example, simply use docker compose up in this directory. Once the container has been created, click the link in the log output to navigate to the instance of Jupyter lab. The image below shows an example of the link to navigate to:

Your browser should navigate to the Jupyter Lab interface, from which you will be able to open any of the example notebooks and execute their content.

To stop running the example notebook server, simply perform a ctrl-c in the terminal running docker compose. The docker-compose.yml configuration defines volumes that will persist any changes made to the notebooks (or additional notebooks you may want to create). The easiest way to perform a full reset of the example is to perform the following in this directory:

docker compose down -v
docker compose up

The container image is pulled from the CableLabs [Artifactory instance][cl-artifactory]; to pull the image manually, simply run docker pull artifactory.cablelabs.com/cl-secpriv-docker/public/qcfoundations:latest

Run Manually with Docker

If you encounter issues with docker compose, the image can be run manually with Docker with the following command:

docker run -i -t --name=qcfoundations -p 8080:8080 artifactory.cablelabs.com/cl-secpriv-docker/public/qcfoundations:latest

Run Locally

The notebooks provided here can be run locally via Jupyter notebook or Jupyter lab. Use of a Python virtual environment (e.g., venv or conda) is strongly encouraged.

Simply install the dependencies and invoke Juypter:

# (In a Python virtual environment)
pip install -r requirementes.txt
jupyter lab --port 8080

If your web browser doesn't open automatically, click the link that appears in the console output.

Additional Resources

You may find the following resources to be helpful in learning the foundations of quantum computing through Qiskit:

• Qiskit (IBM)
• Qiskit Textbook/Free Course
• Quantum Composer User Guide