What Lies Ahead?

One final recap

This course was meant as your first exposure into the world of quantum computation. We started out with how this fascinating new form of computation is different from traditional computers. We discussed what makes qubits special and how their quantum mechanical properties allow superposition, entanglement, and interference. We then went over vectors, states, gates, and we even constructed a small quantum simulator of our own. Then came the serious stuff. We shifted to quantum computing libraries like Qiskit and Cirq and studied three key foundational algorithms,The Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm, Grover’s Algorithm, and Shor’s Algorithm. Each algorithm was more efficient than their best classical computer counterparts. We then broke down each algorithm to its circuits and mathematical derivations in detail.

What we have not covered

But of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s quantum machine learning, quantum neural networks, variational algorithms, quantum approximate optimization algorithms, ising models, and other quantum algorithms that we haven’t discussed in this course. There’s even an entire field known as quantum annealing that works with real quantum computers of the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum era. We strongly urge you to go beyond what we have studied here. So, if you are interested, we’ve compiled helpful resources and links in the next lesson.

A note from the authors

We put this course together after seeing that much of the literature on quantum computing today is inaccessible to most software engineers. Some courses were enshrouded by scary bra-kets, sums, tensor products, and the like. Others over-simplified the literature so much that we ended up with more questions than we started out with.

So we took it upon ourselves to accrue and consolidate the best bits of information from all the resources that we consulted during our learning phase and generated a course that neither over-simplified nor over-complicated things.

In the end, we thank you for the time and effort that you put into this course. We hope you enjoyed studying this course as much as we enjoyed writing it. We sincerely hope that you learned a thing or two about quantum computing and that you walk away from this course with more insight into why quantum computing works the way it does.