Programming your first quantum circuits

Write circuits in Qiskit and run each one on the IonQ simulator from your browser.

Nicolaas SpijkerNicolaas SpijkerCommunity manager, Qollab

Each lesson is built on a Qiskit listing of a few lines. You read the circuit line by line, run it, and read the tally that comes back. Then you change one thing and run the circuit again.

You need a free Qollab account; signing in with Google or GitHub creates one.

6 lessons · ~1 hour

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What you'll learn

The course has seven short Qiskit listings across six lessons, and you run each one from the Code Playground on an IonQ noise-model simulator: IonQ's simulator with an error model set to one of its machines. You start with one qubit and one gate; by the end you have run a two-qubit search algorithm and measured the noise on four IonQ noise models. Every listing is a public project you can open, run, fork and change.

  • How a circuit is built: qubits, gates as method calls, measurement, shots
  • How to read a counts tally and its bars, and why 1,000 shots almost never split exactly in half
  • What the CNOT does, what a Bell pair is, and how Qiskit orders the bits
  • How rotation gates set a probability, and why a phase on its own changes no tally
  • How interference concentrates probability, and how Grover uses it
  • What a noise model is, what changes on a real quantum computer, and how to publish your circuit

Course contents

  1. 01Your first circuitBuild a circuit with one qubit and one gate, run it on a simulator of IonQ's Aria 1 machine, and read the tally.
  2. 02Put a qubit in superpositionThe Hadamard gate, and why 1,000 shots almost never split exactly 500/500.
  3. 03Two qubits and the Bell pairThe CNOT gate flips one qubit when another is 1. Use it to build a Bell pair, and learn how Qiskit orders a two-bit string.
  4. 04Rotate a qubit by any angleRY sets the odds of reading 1 with an angle; RZ changes the phase and, on its own, leaves the tally unchanged.
  5. 05Interference and your first algorithmMake a hidden phase visible, then run a two-qubit Grover search.
  6. 06Noise, and the real machineThe same Bell pair on four IonQ noise models, what changes on a real quantum computer, and how to publish your circuit as a public project.
Nicolaas Spijker
Your instructor
Nicolaas Spijker · Community manager, Qollab

Nico runs the builder community at Qollab and wrote this course.

Qollab ↗GitHub ↗

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