Rigetti Forest 1.0 – programming environment for quantum/classical computing

Re:Rigetti Forest 1.0 – programming environment for quantum/... by scj on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @07:01PM (#14599295)

Just to give you an idea, I've spent about 30-45 minutes reading over various materials (the Github links). I think my level of knowledge would be equivalent of understanding how dup, drop, and rot work in FORTH (or car and cdr in Lisp)... Basic element manipulation (bit/qubit, stack, and list).

The difference though, is that I only needed to understand there was a container of multiple items in FORTH and Lisp. For basic element manipulation, I needed to understand matrices.

At this rate, it would take hours before I understand how to write a basic program. And my trailblazer sense is already tingling (that I should let others be pioneers).

Normally I'd just resume lurker mode at this point, but my interest in combinatorics is driving my curiosity towards understanding what might be possible.

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Re:Rigetti Forest 1.0 – programming environment for quantum/... by reikonomusha on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @08:00PM (#14599571)

I admit it is an unusually larger leap to get to anything useful. We have been blessed to have such a fantastic and intuitive understanding of classical computing. We can pick up most new programming languages gradually and efficiently. When the fundamental object of manipulation is this wacky thing called a "state vector in 2^n dimensional Hilbert space" as opposed to "a bag of bits", and operations must be reversible, and ... and ... and ..., things are just harder.

I hope we (both Rigetti and the quantum computing community at large) can continue to refine and simplify the concepts at hand.

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