That’s right, folks—we’re saying goodbye to our longtime home here on Medium.com. Check our new space at ibm.com/quantum/blog for all future Qiskit blogs. The Qiskit team has spent over seven years building a wonderful community here on the Medium platform. In that time, we’ve used this space to share not only the latest news and updates about Qiskit itself, but also to publish a collection of fascinating stories written by Qiskit users exploring the wide world of quantum software development and quantum information science. Now, we think it’s time for a change of scenery. As part o ..read more

By Abby Mitchell, Jake Lishman, Luciano Bello, Matthew Treinish & Blake Johnson Qiskit 1.0 will be released in February 2024 ? This is a huge milestone, the culmination of six years of open-source efforts, all made possible by the continued enthusiasm of thousands of users and the ongoing support of hundreds of contributors. In this article you’ll find the following: What this upcoming major version means for users How to test out 1.0 functionality before the stable release How to upgrade to Qiskit 1.0 Possible disruptions to be aware of during the transition peri ..read more

By Blake Johnson, Matthew Treinish, Luciano Bello, Jake Lishman, and Kevin Krsulich In case you missed our announcement on the IBM Research Blog earlier this month, Qiskit 1.0 is coming soon! To ensure all our users have the information they need to make the transition, we’re republishing the full article detailing the upcoming release here on the Qiskit Medium. Qiskit 1.0 is a major milestone, the culmination of six years of open-source efforts, made possible by the continued enthusiasm of thousands of users and the ongoing support of hundreds of contributors. A new phase of Qiskit ..read more

Traveling backwards and forwards in time is a common trope that appears often in science fiction. However, as we enter the holiday season, I find myself contemplating a famous time travel story rooted in a very different genre — specifically, a piece of Victorian era morality literature by Charles Dickens. And as usual, I’m doing it from the perspective of quantum mechanics. https://medium.com/media/aa3a8cae883b340d821f54bfe8573059/href Have you guessed the story I’m talking about? That’s right! It’s “A Christmas Carol,” the tale of the grumpy, selfish Ebenezer Scrooge who receives visits from ..read more

By Daniella Garcia Almeida Some researchers believe quantum computers could one day play a vital role in the fight against climate change, enabling simulations of novel sustainable materials, or solving complex optimization problems to minimize greenhouse gas emissions. But when will quantum computers become mature enough to actually tackle these problems at a useful scale? How do we assess which applications and methods will provide the most value? 2023 Deloitte Climate Challenge. Image credit: Deloitte. The annual Deloitte Quantum Climate Challenge aims to answer these questions an ..read more

By Gopal Ramesh Dahale Barren plateaus make it exceedingly difficult to train the quantum circuits we use in quantum neural networks (QNNs). In this blog post, we take a look at how layerwise learning for QNN training, as introduced in [1], can help. Layerwise learning for QNN training involves the gradual addition of individual circuit components during the training process. The circuit’s structure and associated parameters grow step-by-step during training. At the same time, we constrain randomization effects to specific parameter subsets throughout all training stages. This approa ..read more

In recent months, the Qiskit Ecosystem has undergone a series of changes, additions, migrations, and upgrades all driven by a common goal: to provide the community with a greater role in the development of algorithms and applications. To align with this goal, we have moved the applications repositories, relocated the algorithms in Qiskit into their own repository, and welcomed external partners as additional maintainers to the repositories. This blog post delves into the hows and whys of these changes, and introduces the new maintainers. Algorithms as an independent package If you have been fo ..read more

By Jay Shah The Bloch sphere is one of the most popular and recognizable tools for helping new learners understand quantum computing fundamentals. Now, there’s a Qiskit Ecosystem project that helps users visualize Bloch spheres with just a few clicks on a convenient GUI-based tool. The Quantum-Glasses package is a Tkinter GUI app designed to help users visualize the effects of single-qubit quantum gates via interactive Bloch Sphere simulations. Built using Qiskit, the package is a recent addition to the Qiskit Ecosystem Community Tier. It’s designed to be easy to use, and its GUI-based so ..read more

By Abby Mitchell, Luciano Bello, Matthew Treinish, Jake Lishman We’re excited to announce the release of Qiskit v0.45! Read on for a summary of the key highlights and, as always, you can find the full release notes in our documentation here. With this being the last release before Qiskit 1.0, you’ll notice a lot of changes which we’ve highlighted in the article below. https://medium.com/media/2a90b517f858bdc9e088ff5dacdb1a4e/hrefThe TL;DR The biggest updates we’re going to cover include the following: New passmanager submodule to make constructing passmanagers easier New hardware-aw ..read more

By Zhiding Liang, Jinglei Cheng, and Hanrui Wang The world of quantum computing is always evolving. Researchers and scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries, looking for ways to improve the methods they use to harness the power of quantum mechanics. Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), for example, have gained significant traction in recent years as useful tools for exploring optimization and quantum chemistry problems. But how can we make them even better? Traditionally, researchers approach VQAs at the gate-level. More specifically, they focus on the design of a type of q ..read more