Personal blog of Michał Stęchły about quantum computing and more.
Dear Reader, Today, together with my friend Konrad, we’re launching a newsletter about developing quantum software. In this post I want to tell you a bit more about this project. If you don’t want to learn more and just want to subscribe, click here . Context First, let me tell you about Konrad. Konrad is a friend of mine – we’ve been working together since my first quantum job at Bohr in 2018,…
Dear Reader, I’m writing this while sitting on the train from Montreal to Toronto. Why did I visit Montreal? To attend IEEE Quantum Week 2024, also known as QCE24! This was my 3rd Quantum Week and I was looking forward to it! It’s a big conference (~1500 participants) with up to 14 tracks happening simultaneously. So obviously I couldn’t keep track of everything that was going on and my…
Dear Reader, together with a group of people (see at the end) we have organized workshops about Quantum Resource Estimation at IEEE Quantum Week 2023 in Seattle. We had a set of amazing speakers who talked about the topic from various perspectives and in this post, I would like to summarize their talks. We have grouped the workshop into three sessions: Grand Challenges Machinery Tools…
Dear Reader, My main motivation for doing most things I do in my life is that I want to make the world a better place. And as much cliche as it is, well, it is what it is. I’ve recently watched a clip from Jordan Peterson’s lecture and something that really resonated with me was the following quote (even though that wasn’t the main point of the talk): You’re a node in a network. (…) You’ll know a…
Dear Reader, Today we will delve into the details of QAOA – variational quantum algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems. We already covered a lot in previous articles in this series, so I highly recommend going through that first, especially articles 2, 3 and 4, as they are all very relevant. VQE — how it works QAOA — how it works VQAs - how do they work VQAs – challenges and…
Hello! For over a year now I’ve been working on software to do resource estimation (RE) for fault tolerant quantum computation (FTQC). I’ve been working on this as a part of the Quantum Benchmarking program funded by DARPA Being part of this program was an amazing experience, I had an opportunity to work with many great people from all around the world. But this is a story for another time. In…
Let’s move beyond circuits! Last week I attended IEEE Quantum Week conference in Colorado. Out of all the wonderful conversations, presentations and discussions, there is one thought that felt particularly important, which I encapsulated in this tweet: Before Quantum Week: "I have this idea, that perhaps circuits are not a good abstraction for QC. Maybe I'm wrong I hope it's not too…
Dear Reader, In the last couple of years I’ve been mentoring, educating and supporting a lot of people who were at the start of their journey with quantum computing. Apart from that, I’ve been helping with hiring for various positions at Zapata Computing . In the process I’ve reviewed hundreds of CVs and given feedback on tens of them and decided that maybe instead of giving people the same advice…
Dear Reader, Last time we talked about challenges associated with Variational Quantum Algorithms in general and today we’ll focus more specifically on Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). All of the things we’ve covered previously are relevant for VQE as well, but here we’ll focus on challenges and progress that are more specific for VQE. If you don’t remember exactly how VQE works, you can…
Dear Reader, This is the fourth part of my series about Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs). In previous parts we learned how these algorithms work in theory, now it’s time to learn more about some challenges, current research, and practical considerations about them. In this article, we’ll focus on the general issues with running VQAs on quantum computers, regardless of their specific…