Building quantum circuits, state vector simulation, and tensor networks
Details
Abstract: As an engineer and computer scientist, I have found that the best path of entry into quantum computing was to build interactive simulations that I could tweak and experiment with. In this talk, I'll first show how intuition can be built by constructing quantum circuits interactively in Quirk and MuqcsCraft, both of which are open source web-based applications requiring zero software installation. Next, I'll show how you can program your own circuit simulator by implementing a state vector simulation, which essentially involves multiplying matrices together. Finally, I'll explain tensors, and tensor contraction (a generalization of dot products, outer products, matrix multiplications, traces, partial traces, and tensor products), and show how a network of tensors can simulate a quantum circuit, sometimes much more efficiently than a state vector simulator.
Speaker: Michael McGuffin is a professor at ETS, a French-language engineering school in Montreal, Canada, where his students have done research in human-computer interaction, information visualization, virtual and augmented reality. He has degrees from University of Waterloo and University of Toronto, and has spent time working at Alias|wavefront in Toronto and Discreet Logic in Montreal (now both part of Autodesk), as well as Microsoft Research in Seattle. Most recently, McGuffin has been focused on visualization applied to quantum computing. https://profs.etsmtl.ca/mmcguffin/