Quantum Conversations VI: Learning to Learn Quantum!

Quantum Conversations VI: Learning to Learn Quantum!

Recording: Quantum Conversations VI: Learning to Learn Quantum!

what what sources they used right very cool so maybe we'll start with introductions then and kind of again like this is going to be really the hardest part of this meeting is how do we get everybody exactly once we'll see how this can go so maybe i'll just start uh right so um i'm alexi kravrov uh i'm basically uh co-founder of this one uh conversations with sebastian passenger who is uh director of academic partnerships at ibm all right so we kind of ideated how to do a community uh around this we plan physical community uh but obviously pandemic interferes and so we run it online so this is actually the sixth quantum conversations we did this year so we tried to do it last wednesday of the month the previous last wednesday hit thanksgiving holidays uh in the us so we kind of just keep it all together instead of kind of breaking the cadence right so we'll just stick to the last wednesday of the month if that works and for everybody right that's very easy to remember 9 a.m pacific we kind of capture a bit of uh europe as well so i'm i'm a learner i'm a software engineering guy i'm kind of previous live he was a physicist so you know tensors and matrices are you know not scary to me but all the crazy jargon built on top of it for quantum i didn't get to that in my kind of regular uh you know education so i kind of um i'm super interested in uh reconnecting with all of that and kind of you know my whole family physicists and so kind of this this is really cool for me kind of come back from software pure software traditional silicon valley kind of environment where you know it's like you know everybody got the programs and it's all easy kind of you know what to do how do you do this here this is a question for me there is so many diversion paths you know you start it's like a rabbit hole of the rabbit fall you start clicking on wikipedia entrance and they click on other wikipedia androids and after a while you're kind of you know you're somewhere else right so so that's my problem like i i really kind of my question is and i will also want to know in a very tangible way what happens and i don't see this currently in the educational material so like i want to understand exactly how do you input things into quantum computer what is what runs and what comes back and so i don't see that address and a lot of materials right like they talk about qubits honestly i don't care how cubits work i'm a programmer i don't care about how transistor works right i want to know how to input things how do i program the thing how to get the output this is what i care about and this is not not addressed by a lot of this stuff because it's done by physicists right so that's kind of my gripe and my my question uh so sorry this was a very long introduction but maybe like guys you you can kind of introduce yourself and basically like ask like what do you what's the main problem for you like what do you want to learn right that's that's maybe that can be pattern alexi okay yep okay so let's see who's gonna be next maybe we'll go to june june power can you hear me yep okay hi hi yeah so um actually i kind of agree with you um you know my background's computer science and i did physics and math and done a lot of software and i'm just really interested in quantum computing but i'm like you i really want to know like how you put things in how things come out and you know and also if you know some really good places to kind of get up and running with it i did some quantum mechanics you know um in my undergraduate days but i just think this area is so interesting and exciting and i'm just interested in you know hearing people's experiences and what they think anyway that's me thank you jun uh next is uh amiyah nam bisan amaya can you hear us go in once watch okay we'll skip to augusta cleveland's kill movement sorry hey no problem i don't know even how to pronounce it so uh um yeah i'm come from physics i did my master here in buenos aires and now i'm doing software engineering and finance i really enjoyed all the topics that i learned in about quantum things in in college but it gets there it's like you have two options to be the red theoretical one doing some calculus and multiplying a few matrices or you can have a lot of headaches aligning optic optic things so i went to software and now that i have the chance to do a little bit on in jpmorgan before and then they they are starting a few things there but i left the company so oh i'm going in on my way and i i tried to do like little things on that but yeah my main question is how do how to use it how to make it available and how to like have these abstractions because you know like computing is so advanced it's not no not again going through the the same thing as c you're programming in c but with quantum computing is like you can have a higher abstractions and i am really interested in this uh zx calculus so i'm very hopeful to to have something and to learn from that yeah that's mainly my thank you gustav thank you uh next is barjon hi hi everyone my name is from kazakhstan so uh my background is electromechanical engineer and then now i'm working like software engineer in finance and before i have a little experience like physic in physics like a little bit scientist and uh i have a small experience with cricogenic facility when we tested a small small chip like like quantum chip when we estimated uh estimated some values so now i am very interesting to to start uh learn quantum computing inside so that's my issue thank you welcome it's great to have you here uh thank you next is brandon kreshner okay my brother doesn't have a mic so he texted us uh next is dmitry izumski hello so i would say i really kind of curious mostly about application of quantum computing and i will say mostly it was like my long-term goal to learn i'm kind of became more curious because let's say a couple months ago on my software engineer actually started positioning ibm as quantum computer software engineer looks like stuff is changing very fast so this is kind of my intention to start spend more time to actually dedicate and figure out what is actually it means from practical perspective thank you welcome victory uh next is uh dylan mahoney uh hi i'm a i'm a freshman undergraduate at stanford i think i'm probably going to major in physics and quantum computing and like quantum information science seems like a pretty interesting field thereof so i guess i just kind of want to learn more about it great thank you welcome next is jay mcgill uh yeah hey everybody i love this meetup um based out of wisconsin and i'm in between undergraduate study and graduate study but it's been a great year to soak up a lot of quantum computing content um so primarily i'd say this year my free time i soak up a lot of different events and different conferences and the different things that companies put on tutorials and workshops and stuff so it's a long journey but my problem is i'm kind of interested in all of it because i started out as like a chemistry person who learned physics to understand the chemistry and then once i got more into theoretical physics i started looking at some you know information theory computer science type stuff and along the way i've done a little bit of coding not a software engineer but um you know it's just a blend of a lot of interesting areas so uh still learning still figuring things out but uh just a really cool area awesome thank you jimmy it's like everybody right like we all learn so it's great uh next is jean paul sadia hello can you hear me yep okay uh i'm a undergraduate freshman i'm studying mathematics um i'm interested in uh kind of all the technologies that quantum can uh yield but i i'm also interested in the impact that the technologies will have so yeah that's about it uh undergraduate math awesome thank you thank you john paul welcome uh jonathan candelaria yes hi lexi um so i work at uh at stanford but i'm really here to find out what everybody else's experiences have been uh you know learning uh from mostly online resources i think uh primarily and a lot of different uh you know tutorials and webinars but also the certificate uh classes that you know mit and chicago and berkeley and so forth have been putting on as well as the all the resources that ibm and others have provided for for learning programming but i'd like to hear just you know for people who uh from people who have taken those those courses do they feel like they're at a point where they're able to start actually doing something you know do they know enough to really do something or or are they still lacking something and if so what is that yeah and then we can we can we can talk maybe more about that but i'm also here representing the qedc which is a national consortia of industry and academia and government agencies and so i'm working in the workforce development committee and that committee is specifically aimed at uh wanting to learn these kinds of things you know what education gaps are there um we know what the jobs are that are are needed in industry mert knows a lot about that because he helped me put together a survey that we recently completed of industry and so we know all about their their needs uh right now and and what they think the impact will be in the near to medium term but uh but are we ready do we have the the workforce ready and if not then what do we need to uh to do to help uh help get them ready hi john thanks for joining fantastic yeah it's great to have you with us again thanks john jonathan hi there my name is canal i studied physics and computer science in school um i was a software engineer for three or four years and decided i wanted to do something more mathematical um i have been doing some independent work in quantum computing mostly in the algorithm side uh questions that i'm most interested in are what can you do with a quantum computer that we don't know about yet um what problems are not solvable with a regular computer that you could do with quantum computer and what are the relative merits of like current uh exciting quantum algorithms for near-term and for long-term computers so i'm i'm pretty interested on like the math side but i also have a lot of interest in open source and i'm sort of curious like if anyone's used uh quantum country by michael nielsen and other like um online resources similar to the last uh speaker uh thank you canal yeah this is like our old great questions i'm sure we're all asking them uh as well right so that's that's great uh thanks for for kind of summarizing this so concisely next is lilavathi yartha lilavathi hi i'm i'm leela i'm a parent of a 14 year old boy who is a freshman at dvhs san ramon california he's very much interested in math and computer science he has exceptional knowledge in physics as well as astronomy it was just a since his childhood we encouraged him to read those books to improve his reading skills but he went beyond that and he's very good with that he has so many questions on those and we introduced him quantum computing little bit to what it is and what is the difference between computer science and quantum computing as well so we just i'm just wondering what kind of resources he would have to improve his knowledge without depending on any school or anything as well as do you have any resources for high schoolers to get them introduced to quantum computing and understand what is the benefit of it and how they can improve their skills and get into that field this is awesome thank you for joining i mean i wish every parent you know would be as good as you you know i have a 12 year old son he's not yet there i would say but this is this is awesome absolutely i mean feel free to invite your son to join us as well right because i guess this field is new i have a feeling that maybe somebody fresh who did not really get kind of conditioned in the old school maybe succeed even better right because like you know you don't need to rewire all your neurons right you you don't have to assume things are as they are i think a lot of problems come from that uh but if that's awesome uh welcome um so next is mert and mert is also the coordinator center quantum and i and he will be the first uh kind of lighting top presenter today yeah hi everyone i am a master's student at stanford i will graduate in a few days uh i also did my undergrad at stanford uh in physics and symbolic systems symbolic systems is a stanford specific major where we take classes from computer science philosophy linguistics and psychology so it's an interdisciplinary major and i'm one of the founding members of stanford quantum computing association and yeah i just want to talk about a few resources that i i used when i was learning about quantum computing so i am a student of quantum computing thank you america i'm looking forward to that uh and really i appreciate kind of jumping in on a rather short notice uh before the holidays but this is this is awesome uh and uh we have a couple folks left uh nathan shore hello you can hear me i take it yes nathan i'm a bit of an odd bird from you guys i'm in my seventies i have no math and science background in uh no math matter physics formal background uh i did it marketing and sales but i've had a lifetime fascination with math i've always liked it since i was a kid and now that i'm in the winter of my life i decided what am i going to do and uh quantum computing is the intersection of physics math computer science so it seduced me two years ago and i started uh learning on my own and i've gone through uh the learning curve quite intensely it's all i do all day in fact i have a resource that i'll post on the chat called quantumcurious.org where i've collected mine and many other people's uh experiences in climbing the curve and there's lots of resources there curated for beginners so i'll post that as time goes on today thank you very much nathan and i got your email you know uh you know in the community right so really appreciate you joining and i think this is you know this is really awesome right like we have you know we have 14 years old we have 70 years old so i mean this is for everybody right this is kind of it really connects a lot of a lot of folks so so really appreciate everybody joining uh and uh you're really looking forward for you know uh kind of uh connecting with you in the community and looking at your uh at your uh resources uh and our uh uh last interview is from rishi and rishi is also a lightning talk speaker take it away rishi hi everyone my name is rishi and i'm a i'm a recent masters graduate from chalmers university in sweden so my bachelor's was in electrical engineering from india and all i had all the physics background that i had was like basic physics 101 courses that you have and some quantum mechanics very introductory quantum mechanics courses and i recently graduated from the erasmus masters in nanoscience program and even there in the first year we didn't have a lot of quantum mechanics but then i came to chalmers to specialize on quantum computing and then it was like you were expected to know so much so i had to rely a lot on online resources and so i'd be talking about a few of those that worked for me uh hopefully and that will be helpful for others looking forward to this thank you fantastic thank you rishi yes so basically we've been very fortunate you know uh for this session kind of to see it with two lightning talks by merit and by rishi uh and then we can just all kind of jump in so maybe let's just do that right merit maybe we'll start with you and kind of uh you know we can kind of uh discussion and then we'll you know proceed with rishi's uh uh lightning talk and then we can all kind of using all what we learned maybe we can all jump in after that so thank you to emerge yeah thanks um so i want to start with a quick paul uh uh if everyone can either shout or write to the chat their main resource for learning quantum computing what what they use it can be a book it can be a website um it can be anything basically so mine mine was i would say um i would say nielsen and trunks book on on quantum computation and quantum information yeah exactly i that's what i'm getting mostly exactly yeah um great we have mit x pro's four core series kisket videos on youtube okay that's that's programmer's approach that alex he was talking about that's a good one too it's a quantum mechanics theoretical minimum by susquehanna freeman it's a popular book but it's a good introduction interesting okay so um so i'm just gonna give an overview of some of the i just like accumulated some resources and uh i i can email this to anyone who who wants who wants a formal document let me put my email on the chat okay so but i'm just going to talk about them so i don't have a document uh that i can share right now but um so okay so the textbooks right let's start let's start with the books so i have a few books here that i wanted to share so this is nielsen and chuang's uh uh book that's it's pretty old but it's you it's always the first uh and the main uh resource for people who are starting uh in quantum computing and i think it's more i can say more computer science oriented uh but it's it also has some physics and for uh for people who want to learn physics okay let's let's do this so this is uh as alex showed uh mike and ike nielsen chuang the main textbook and then for the physics people this is the quantum mechanics book we used at stanford griffiths it's an introduction to quantum mechanics and it's pretty solid it's not directly applicable to quantum mechan quantum computing but uh i i use a lot of quantum mechanics i used a lot of it when i was learning about quantum computing and i it's my favorite textbook of all time so i would highly recommend it to people who are interested in the physics of things and on the other side we have uh jack hidery's book quantum computing and applied approach and this is for uh people who just want to learn about the the programming and be more on the practical side rather than theory and it has a lot of examples from google circ as jack is associated with google and also on the fun side we have scott erinson's uh quantum computing sys democritus and this one i just started i i haven't finished it so if anyone has read it please say something about it but uh uh it's more i think math oriented scott is a computer scientist i think so um yeah i read it last year it's really good in introducing all the concepts it's mainly focused on complexity of algorithms and what are the different classes of this algorithm this complexity class is really interesting i had it a little harder to read because i i don't have any computer science background so it was like a step by step but he has like a very good blog and his own like computer complexity sue so you can go there and look into the things that he's talking about yeah that's that's really cool and and some conclusions are really good yeah and and interesting on topics like like the multiverse and all facts you build from the quantum computing and complexity things it's really fun to also to hear their their interviews his interviews and podcasts and on shows it's really nice cool yeah i should i should read it all right thanks uh and then this is my this is also one of my favorite books of all time i wouldn't call this a textbook but this is more uh for people who are interested in the philosophy of things so this is a history of physics book and also a philosophy of physics book so it talks about the interpretations of quantum mechanics what it all means uh but it all it and it's also like a very physics oriented and ends with uh ends with quantum information sciences and quantum computing this is actually the book that got me interested in quantum computing so i was taking uh uh philosophy of physics course my freshman year at stanford and um the the around the last uh chapter of this book talks about uh how david larch argues that quantum computers are proof proofs for the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics because to have that much computational power the the the computer must be harnessing the power of multiple universes so that's his argument also i just started a book by uh by david dutch uh it's called the fabric of reality and it's it's going pretty well but uh that's for the fl that's the flows a few of things so these are all books i mean you can uh everything is online now so you can buy them or have other options of obtaining them uh online but um yeah they're great i mean textbooks i think are great i i'm i'm not a a new new school kind of person where i believe in the in the um anti-textbook uh philosophy i i think textbooks are great so uh other than that so i'm gonna go with the i'm gonna get more uh decentralized uh but as we go on i'm gonna i wanna talk about university lectures so um so i was a ta for a class at stanford i can ask the professor to maybe share those uh if you email me i'm not sure how that that would work but uh i don't think that class is public some of the stanford classes are public but we use a lot of material that's public so i can give those so uh carnegie mellon university has uh has lectures that i used while i was preparing psets mit obviously has vice scott aronson that's a bit uh dated as well i don't know if uh university of texas lectures of scott are published and then there's also i think uh lectures from delft that i used uh but again like if you email me i can give all of these to you as a with the links and everything so let's move towards the online uh web web pages and stuff so uh nielsen uh has a blog a blog and um i can i'll share that at the end of this talk but uh in the chat but it's a bit old and he has a youtube series and i i think he also started uh quantum country um thanks rishi for summarizing uh the books uh so neil nielsen's blog i i haven't watched those video i think i watched the only first one the introduction to cubits video but he is the writer of he's one of the authors for the for the main textbook for quantum computing i would say so those lectures if you're more more video oriented they they would work really well to complement maybe some of the stuff on the book uh in the book and uh there's also scott's blog um scott erinson's blog if you just google scott erinson blog that's more for keeping up with the news what's going on it's also more on the theory side but um it's really fun to read i think it's really fun read so you could also uh keep a track of that you can log in once every week and see what's going on in the in the both in the academia and the industry um there's also um yeah again quantum country and also i was gonna it's great that nathan shores here because i was gonna mention quantum curious nathan just started that with uh terrell front friends that's that's that you started with terrell right nathan or is am i am i wrong yes you're right i use terrell's data as a front end perfect yeah so uh yeah i john sorry go ahead carol has a site called quantum uh appaloosa it's very intense it lists hundreds of things it's raw html format a lot of work went into it so what i do is i filter out the he's broken things down to three or four categories quantum curious uh quantum explorer and so on all the way up to quantum pro so i've taken the first layer quantum curious and i curate those events as well as all sorts of other resources yeah so yeah that was next on my list quantum uh palooza um again i'll share these links that's uh you you could also check that out terrell is a professor in i'm not going to say i don't want to say anything wrong but physics hairspray sorry harrisburg harrisburg no no oh yeah yeah but i was i was talking about um not the university uh the field uh computer science computer science okay hyper security perfect all right uh so you you can also check that out and there are like many online resources and then we also have some resources from the industry so uh i for example i attended the ibm summer school which was great we had a lot of like practical stuff like labs and then also lectures uh three hours lectures every day for two weeks and it ended with uh with a career uh lecture so how to how to how to get into the quantum computing industry so uh that was also great it was actually overpopulated ibm i initially created this for five around like 300 students or so and then i think 5 000 people tried to join uh so they had to like change their old infrastructure overnight and still they couldn't have everyone attend at least the labs but i was lucky enough to get into the labs so that's that is actually great that we have so many uh quantum curious people as nathan's site uh is labeled um so and then there's also ibm challenge so that you don't have to wait on every summer to learn about quantum computing but ibm also has challenges i think every one every a few times every year that you can also have like do these labs and submit your responses to get certificates and lastly that there are there are tutorials on every language most big companies like google ibm uh they have their own language like circus kit and they have their own tutorials so uh you comprehensive youtube videos and then um stuff that you can just like jupyter notebooks that you can just download and play with and so lastly there's also the um free trials of every major uh hardware provider like if you go and sign in into any uh hardware pro i like d-wave that's that's open to public or uh or ibm you get get at least around one minute free time that you can use so uh i would highly recommend uh playing around with the computer that's right now free and available oh also that wasn't the last sorry i have a few more i have a second page uh feel free to join in anytime please and uh alex if i'm going over time please say so no so guys you know like please so there's also uh conferences uh one that was that happened very recently was q2b by qc ware so that's my ex-employer i worked for them for around five months as a part-time researcher uh it's more business oriented but it's also i think great for people who are just entering the field because it's not highly technical for business people so um i think it's a great entry point in the field uh ebay also had one so my research was on annealing dba provides uh annealing uh methods so there are two methods in quantum computing one is gate based one is annealing based and um actually you could put topology topological methods into another category but anyway so and my research was on annealing and so i attended the steve conference uh that was really helpful for for me there's also a unitary fund uh that also does talks like we do uh researchers come in and share their their projects uh that's on discord unitary fund is created by bill zhang and uh there's of course the stanford events the stanford quantum computing association event and you don't have to be a stanford student so just before i graduated i tried to open up our events as much as i could uh our last event was with andre koenig and denise rufner then he's just joined iron inq from from cambridge quantum computing and andre runs one quantum we also created a uh we organized a quantum chess tournament and that was that was um across universities but it was mainly stanford and berkeley uh it's disappointing for me to say that berkeley won the tournament we had stanford versus berkeley at the final game uh and then we have many more events you can join our newsletter i can also put that link down here after my talk and there are also articles lastly so if you're more into the the if you have one niche field that you want to really learn as much as you can about like my field my my research was on reverse annealing which is even uh more uh particular than in the whole annealing field and there's uh for example will zank that i just mentioned who created unitary fund has a paper called a practical quantum instruction set architecture about um about about the language and the compiling of quantum computing um there is also google's tensorflow quantum paper that's also really cool and then like there are many more papers that are intro level that uh one can read about and they're all online like you can do that right now go to archive and go search for these names and you will find the papers so uh overall my what what how i did things and how i would do differently is that i think and many many people who who go to like uh who go to these resources to learn it's it's really like fun and and games like you can have fun have fun while learning and obviously we are all interested in this field that's why like you are attending this talk but i think that people learn best when they have uh projects with concrete uh goals and deadlines so uh i i think that that's what i realized when i did my uh research at qc where like i learned so much because i had to make those deadlines like i had to i had the presentation to show every week blah blah blah so like i so those those worked in favor for my learning whereas um for that i mean personally for me if i have like a class like homework a test or a presentation to make i i i i'm more motivated to learn so my advice would be to like uh try to get yourself involved with these projects there like many many many open source projects right now that you can just get get into one going into github and like starting contributing on a project one one one example i would give to that would be the the quantum chess uh uh repo that we used um that was that's actually half finished so it has superposition but it doesn't have entanglement and the person who created it obviously did a great job but it's it's it's not finished and the last uh push was made on in 2016 or something so um like if if you're interested you you could just like start coding this up and and there are also many quantum simulators that are online um so so you could easily assign yourself a project and i i think that would be the the best way to learn about these things now i would like to say in this line of thoughts that quantum open source foundation and i post a link they have a mentorship program where people are mentoring mentees that are interested in specific projects usually people go through some kind of selection process to see their level of understanding quantum computing and what they're interested in um at the moment i'm for example mentoring like five people that i selected that are relevant to what i can mentor uh with respect to the interests um so that's one place you can consider to get into the quantum computing uh room yeah yeah thank thanks for sharing that see that's great so i didn't i didn't know about this one but there are so so many resources and uh um i think the again the best way to to motivate uh for me to motivate myself was to have a complete project and uh that's with deadlines and deliverables but that's that's all i had and um yeah so i just i i'm not i don't want to be the one that that's doing i mean that was a fantastic start and a great overview of you know all the books i like i just went and bought a couple on amazon as he was talking about them because i didn't know about them so you know i'm like i'm this kind of a guy you know i hoard books so i i you know i'd rather have a book and and like look at it than not have a book and wonder if i should have had it so but then that's just me uh so thank you thank you uh so guys uh i guess we can do it maybe if you have question for murdered right we can do like a traditional q a if you have if you guys have any questions or we can um hear rishi who is an another lightning talk speaker and maybe we can maybe like do q a's to both of them after that what do you guys think anybody has pressing questions to merge right now um i have one quick question let's go ahead miss john so mert uh you said you took the ibm um you know summer summer school um how would you characterize that course compared to um you know what you which you learned at stanford in the courses there or maybe the books that you've been reading i mean how was it similar or different and you know what what new things did you learn there that might be not available in any other form so um well obviously the course was for like 2 000 people or something so you didn't get a lot of um you could maybe i didn't but like um it's not like a 30-person course where you can talk to the professor uh throughout the course but you can like text your questions or something um i know i i think it was still self-learning in some sense so you're not like being fed in formation and you don't really have to like if you're not self-motivated you don't really have to like in courses like this you don't really have to like uh push yourself to learn more or like even like finish the course i mean i i got a certificate at the end but it wasn't like that hard to get that certificate whereas a a university course than you are you have really hard uh psets at least our stanford physics um classes were a bit on the difficult side and uh you had to like meet with other students and work on on problem sets together it wasn't uh a one-person deal whereas uh ibm did a great job on connecting people over discord and everyone could like talk to each other post their questions there uh but again that like that small community feel is really hard to find uh when when this field has so much demand people want to learn about it so i don't know how how that would be accomplished uh in a online setting but yeah that's like i think it was it was very concrete in the sense that we had like daily labs so every day we had to finish one lab that was a jupiter notebook so it was very similar to like uh university psets but yeah again i i i think that's it's really hard to find that like that feeling of having other people's teaching because you don't only learn from a lecture at school you also learn from friends especially in physics you learn mainly from like students who are struggling with your uh at 2am to finish that quantum mechanics pset so um i would say that we still like need universities and uh and uh that that feeling hopefully after uh this pandemic will also be in classrooms it's really hard to like incorporate through a computer screen uh but yeah that feeling of being in a in a classroom and working together uh through a pset is i think an essential element of learning so if i may add to that that's a good question john is that so i i didn't attend the ibm's summer school but then there was i don't know if anybody knows about q world so they are also another organization that holds workshops and courses but uh the course that they have now is like q bronze uh it's it's a bit too simple maybe it's it's mostly aimed at high school students so maybe they love the uh this is something that's interesting to you your son and it's it starts from very basics like coin toss and then tries to get people more interested into teleportation and [Music] a couple more things and it uses kisket so it's it starts off very slow and so if you already know what quantum is and if you had at least one course maybe this could be a bit too simple for you but yeah so they they also have this thing and i mean so one good thing that i liked about the or the one silver lining that i see about kovid is that a lot of things moved online right so uh i mean otherwise maybe i wouldn't even have been able to attend this condo conversations because it's uh and so it was it was a really good platform for me to network and get to know people beyond the circle that i usually am in right so in that aspect it was it was very nice uh but then again like murder saying as far as learning goes uh it's still very questionable i i do prefer uh working with my friends on problem sets and then like of course but uh but yeah this uh you get to know a lot more people and then you can you can build on that you can maybe uh you you like some of the discussions that some people were having on the project and then you can take that outside right you can take it and work on some more projects so uh it again it has like pros and cons so this is another aspect to it that i thought was nice thank you uh any other questions for mert no but uh nathan here can i get up yes uh but i haven't we've been talking about books as a common theme and i have an observation about that because merch showed a few of them uh despite the fact that i'm probably least on the list here in in terms of stem credentials uh i'm inadvertently developed over the last two years an expertise uh i've spent about uh two years now as i said reading quantum computing and quantum mechanics books to support it so it's about 70 of them on the quantum curious site i've listed them all with some commentary so i developed a bit of an expertise and my summary of that is the book for the average beginner not the high school person that's a different category not people with a physics or math background that's yet another category there's plenty of books for them but for the average person the quantum curious or the quantum explorer or the quantum enthusiast that book remains to be written uh uh that's a project i'd be interested in looking into if someone else knew someone who was working on that a book for the average joe so to speak uh maybe someone with a college degree but not a stem degree necessarily uh mike and like's a great book but it's for graduate level it's really well written the english i mean if english is not your foreign language you probably learn more about writing english in that book than you might about quantum computing it's really well written but it's too advanced and so are many of the others so uh that's an observation oh thank you yeah i mean you know uh i see kind of approaching this area there is no shortage of uh angles from which it can be done right so i think currently there is a lot of things for physicists i personally see a huge gap for software engineers who have very kind of specific and pragmatic uh needs right so i am sure there can be a lot of uh other interest hopefully as a result of this maybe some of the folks here will will do that uh so maybe maybe we can uh now let rishi uh the floor and after that we can all just have a general discussion what do you guys think right so just a comment on nathan's uh earlier statement maybe nathan have you heard of this community called quantum london uh so they are also business oriented uh people and i think they may know a bit more about so if you would like to speak to them then maybe i can send you their contact and it's it's it's available online so that's quantum london as the city london and uk yeah yeah yeah uh it's uh paolo and m i don't know m's full name now but uh but i can i can write it in the chat towards the end while we are having discussions and also there's quantum tech daily again from london so uh yeah it is it is few uh but people are trickling in from non-technical areas which is which is really nice because to have a proper ecosystem ecosystem you need people from all aspects right so right uh yeah so now maybe i'll share some of the experiences that i've had uh learning quantum computing and i don't know how popular to take this is but uh this is and it's not mind right it's called parents in sense god caught says that quantum computing and quantum mechanics becomes a lot more simpler if you take the physics out of it right so and i agree so for me uh my background was electrical engineering and it was not even electronics where you have some theme or stuff going on it's uh it's like big dc machines and outdated stuff and i uh yeah let's not go there but i would say that one of the biggest prerequisites for learning quantum computing would be linear algebra right that's uh i mean what i felt is that quantum computing is linear algebra being very fancy and so for that because i mean yeah let me motivate that maybe then it's because your quantum states and everything are like vectors in some vector space in a hilbert space and all the gates that you apply or transformations to those vectors and your vector goes from one point to another and things move around and so you can you can map you can get a very better i mean you can get much better intuition as to what's going on if you know linear algebra and about so in linear algebra you talk about eigenvalues and eigenvectors and about basis transformations and these things are at least getting to be familiarized to these things help immensely in understanding what quantum computing or what quantum mechanics is trying to say right because yeah so for that i would highly highly recommend gilbert strang's online lectures from mit open coursework it's super simple it starts off with vector matrix multiplications and it just blows your mind right i mean it's ah it's just it it gives you uh different ways to think about vector matrix multiplications matrix matrix multiplications and so on and even like entanglement right so when you say quantum entanglement it's like ooh spooky but fundamentally mathematically it's it's singular value decomposition and that's and that's covered really well in the lectures but towards the end maybe like 26 or something so so i would highly recommend and you don't even need to know physics or or anything right it's uh use lectures are those again you said it quickly please say it slowly right yeah sorry uh oh yeah so maybe before this uh so i i started typing out all this into a list but then i procrastinated a bit so it's not finished but uh i will type it out and i'll send it to alexa or you can you can i'll put my email also in the in the chat and then i can send it to you yeah i'll look into the list uh whether you should send it and i'll post it on their website quantum dot through our main website right and another thing is uh so i don't know if everybody knows this but you can save the chat to your own computer you just go to the chat and then there are three dots and you click it and you can save it so that's something that maybe you could do oh yeah i didn't know that yeah each time i was copying and pasting it somewhere in the tab in my i mean in in firefox somewhere but you could just save it and it just saves a lot of time how do you do this again so you go to your chat and then there's three dots in the in the right corner like more uh maybe okay anyway you yeah i can figure it out you can go on with your two no yeah it's uh yeah it's just three dots and it says more and just say chat yeah right uh yeah so singular value decomposition right and that gives you a completely new perspective on what entanglement is and once you know sort of what entanglement is then you can i mean then it's it's so much easier to sort of say what quantum advantage is then or when your quantum computer sort of outperforms a classical computer and so on so you start from some very basic stuff and then you can get so much more insight than you started off with right so that's something i love so linear algebra and you need linear algebra everywhere right so machine learning whatever so it's it's one skill that is definitely never going to not do you any good and so once you have that done or even before that so that was probably one of the biggest it it's like the i forget the name but the 80 20 principle you uh 20 of the effort sort of counts for 80 of the results this has anybody of this it's some french mathematician or philosopher or someone who came up with this then it's uh so yeah so that was a large part of the twenty percent of my efforts was learning neurology that would be the parietal principle yes that's it i didn't want to yeah i don't want to not know the name i mean mispronouncing it but yes right and so the next thing was getting to know the physics was right because a lot of these i mean you start looking into quantum you're suddenly thrown at what hamiltonians are and what excited states are and energy levels and uh and so on and it's it's i mean yeah so chalmers this is one of the first courses that we had and one of the in the first pro in the first lectures the professor's like okay so today we will find we'll quantize an electrical circuit and find what the hamiltonian is and i'm like what's hamiltonian so it's uh but then and these are things that maybe physics undergrads deal with in their second year or something so it's something very basic that maybe not many people talk about and if i'm talking too fast please tell me that because i tend to do that uh sorry right uh and something that really worked for me was a theoretical minima by professor suskin uh and his classical mechanics course right it was so good and uh it was it was very uh it was very consuming right it's not something that you can just or at least for me it was not something that i could just sit and watch on a on a weekend to unwind or something it was i had to sit down and each lecture was maybe 1 hour 40 minutes or something and it took me at least four hours to get through one right so i sit down and i have i write my notes and it's you have to keep re-watching it and this is after i watch it like at 1.5 speed so it's but it's awesome it's it's super good and you you get you get sort of an understanding of what where the hamiltonian comes from right it's and it's no longer some uh esoteric like super fancy thing that people just say oh yeah apply the hamiltonian but yeah so once you once you sort of know what a hamiltonian is and you sort of know what is the linear algebra or what is the map that is sort of going behind all this then i would say you're in a good position and you can at least start to be part of the conversations that happen around uh and of course it helps to have quantum mechanics courses because then and it's and these things like this superposition and entanglement and these things are not something that you finally understand it's just something that you get used to is what i feel so yeah i i totally agree with that i right it was simon who said richard feynman said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics you don't know enough of it or something exactly right i i agree and it's and for me it's always been you look at the same concept from different perspectives and you things sort of start lightening up and you sort of get more and more used to it and yeah you you carry on i guess uh right so for basic quantum mechanics again uh there's uh mit open courseware there's quantum mechanics one two and three uh i followed quantum mechanics one and it was it was already like i mean i had usual college work and this so i was already way over my head but uh it was super good and i recommend it but again there are there are these these resources are the ones that i followed but the there are there are a lot of others that are equally or more good maybe and it's it works works for you right and yeah one one thing that i was really happy about was uh i was worried that martin i may talk about end up talking about the same thing and uh nothing new so i'm really happy that uh it's a textbook guy and i'm more of a video lectures guy so i prefer video lectures because that allows me to just sit with it and then if there's some interaction going on and i have very short attention span so it's textbooks but again that's personal preference right so now you have or hopefully the people get to have a more wide variety of things to pick up from right and i was writing down a few notes while people were talking about things that they may be interested in and right before that so yeah with these three things i think you're in a good place to uh so basic you know linear algebra and with that you sort of know almost a lot of quantum computing this is maybe a gross simplification that are like very different niches and all those things but at least you can be a part of these conversations right and then you follow professor saskins course so there is the theoretical minima and it has everything it is classical mechanics it is statistical mechanics it's quantum computing i mean it is quantum mechanics it is entanglement but for me i think it would take my life time to go through all that because it took me so long to just to get get through the classical mechanics one but i would love to it's it's on my bucket list right and yeah another great thing that i another great resource that i've loved is meetups like these right it's when you get to know people and you get to know sort of things that work for other people and uh and and it's been great it's uh so i really enjoy that and uh so like i said one of the probably the only silver lining of covet is that a lot of these conferences and talks are online and you can share your space you can share a room i'll buy towards someone with uh people that you may never do it right so i mean in in just last quantum conversations in alexa's conversations eddie in the same room and i was like freaking out oh no anybody's here because uh so i'm working with qa way i mean i'm i'm working on qa my entire piece is on qaoa and people who know eddie fari is the one who made qa wait right so it's like whoa yeah but uh so that's super cool and uh and i love that and so there are a lot of such communities that i would highly recommend people be a part of because again you get to see different perspectives and then you get to talk to a wide variety of people and that's super nice for example nathan has a newsletter that i follow and it's super nice go nathan and uh so mert was talking about andre and denise uh they also have the one quantum organization and they have a weekly or um yeah i think it's a weekly uh weekly show on youtube so called the weekly quantum world be tangled and it's an amazing resource you get to you get to listen to people who are in the top of the game right so you get to listen to ceos or and from different parts of the world and they are doing a really good job so check them out a quick quick correction it's not me it's nathan it's not me who has the newsletter it's doug fink it's called quantum computing report quantum report.com i put it earlier in the chat right and it's really worth looking at it it comes out on sundays and in 10 minutes you get in the view what's going on in the industry so for beginners it's really well done quantumcomputingreport.com right it's the one by ornl right no it's one by ornl no no no it's the one by doug fink it comes out sunday it's been coming out for a couple years it's free and really well done 10 minutes really worth looking at you get a good overview of the industry right yeah thank you for that but i remember seeing uh so had you written about the one quantum organization's women in quantum because i remember seeing an email from you in my newsletter that's why i said it and it was super cool but thanks right and yeah so there are people also who are who would really like to know how to how do i get started or how do i start using this thing right i mean yeah there's a qubit that is like super conducting that's photonics so for that again ibm has been doing a great job putting real devices in the cloud for people to access that's super cool it's uh anybody can make their own account in the ibmq experience i believe and you can start using it and casekit also is very well documented and they have a they have a really strong community going on so kisskid also has a slack channel so if you if you would want to meet more kisket people join that it's a great place and also so tensorflow quantum right so tensorflow quantum is uh what's really cool is that they have a weekly sync thing that is open for all and anybody can join it right and you can talk to people who made tensorflow quantum and you can you can be at least for me i've tried to join the past two things and i mean mostly i am a mute spectator because that's not what i work on but it's it's awesome that you can do it and so just the last thing uh what they were talking about was adonis professor erdan is from qc where uh talking about loading classical data into quantum computers and that's something that people are interested in right so uh and then there was a discussion then uh google's ryan bobush was there allen and yeah you were there i mean you could be there with that with that team and just listen to all the cool things that happen so a lot of things are happening um it's good to it's good to be part of these meetup troops and so on and uh that can help right and uh uh so it's it's i do agree that there's a very distinct shortage of not involving non-technical people into the con conversations uh but i think that's also changing because in medium i see a lot of these posts like quantum computing for the curious quantum computing for dummies quantum computing for the confused and so on and that's uh how that's been very helpful for me so maybe i'll put that in my list and then i can share it with you guys and it's it's it's nice to it's nice to see that there is some change happening at least right uh right let's see this so i talked about tensorflow quantum kitchen [Music] right and so uh mart already talked about the qosf the quantum open source foundation and the unitary fund so they also have a discord channel where you could join and then you could be part of the conversations that they're having and so on and so this quantum london also holds monthly meetings like [Music] like this one and they're also a major chunk of the conversation is from a business perspective i believe like when will this start being useful uh how do people get started and then and so on so it's uh and i think they call it quantum stomach i'm not even sure if i'm saying it right but it means it's like a round table conference or something and it's pretty cool and yeah i guess the zx calculus i'm also super excited about zx calculus but i am i'm also yet to start learning it so my work is on tensor networks and if people are interested maybe we can discuss that too because but i think i've been talking on for a long time and i don't want to put anyone to sleep [Music] and let's see this uh yeah so lulate uh q world is probably a good or good place for you and your son and also this cupid bicubit that you shared in the chat uh i think that's also mostly i've i have not been a part of their lectures but i think they're mostly uh aimed at high school students also so i think you need to know what trigonometry is but uh yeah and uh yeah so q world also has this q intern program so they had one chapter of that i think like one edition it's just like the quantum mentorship that someone mentioned and right and then there is so there are many communities out there and there are many people who write about these things so and linkedin is a very great place to network i would say i mean i don't know what people's opinions are of linkedin but i really like that i started networking only like three months four months ago because the pandemic hit a lot of my plans from south but i've been having a really good experience with so far people have been very helpful and you reach out to them they're kind and then you be kind and you help and then yeah so it's been it's been really nice so i would suggest following agi from i gave a seriously previously a perimeter faculty and now they're in ibm and also a blog called musty thoughts from michael getly so michael is uh is also maybe someone who can have a lot of insights because he's not he was uh he was a software engineer for a long time and then he shifted into quantum computing and so recently he's he said that he would have a blog on how you can get started into being a quantum software engineer and he was asking for people for suggestions from what they would like to see him write about right so yeah sorry about uh but uh that's all i had to say i believe thank you that was awesome that was a great review uh question so that you mentioned this talk about loading classical data into quantum computers is it available online somewhere is it required i i need to check that because i i know that they recorded it but i don't know if they have made it publicly available yet yeah maybe from cuba yeah that's why you're dennis right so yeah yeah yeah so i think jordan is published on the subject but i i would add it to my uh google talk if no yeah so they have published this it's published but if you prefer a talk and it was it was followable i could understand it although i have zero experience on that side of things somebody has a link that would be great to follow up all right i i will put that in my in the doc in the dock yes thank you yeah so so people who post in the chat for the resources i think this is what we'll do rishi and i will uh create a google doc together and then email us we can share that with you but alexey i think has all of your emails so alex you can just send it out to you guys after we finish is that yeah i mean yeah do it i will just post the link on quantum sv uh website you know and then that will be available to everybody so website again want them what uh quantum dot three that's the main website for this quantum conversation it's i'll just type it in here it's quantum quantum dot sv for silicon valley ah thank you so that's kind of you know it's a tumblr blog we currently just post the analysis thank you and links but uh we can also create a kind of resource section there along overdue and add the documents as needed so so i don't i just wanted to kind of shoot gears a little bit and and so uh uh it's you know there is like a push and pull models of education right so the classical education is a push model where the professors are pushing knowledge on you right and the professors arrive at it through a variety of ways it's kind of it's almost like a religion right like the pope proclaims encyclicals and then they percolate down to the bishops and to the priests and then they gather the masses and like some of the literal presence of italy don't even know it's in latin they kind of they used to kind of just repeat the words without knowing the meaning right so in a way that's kind of traditional science works so you know in the kind of in silicon valley we disrupted this bike having a bunch of folks just jumping in with journalism degree or like whatever like reading a bunch of o'reilly books learning you know open source languages like ruby and python and so it's kind of more of a pool right because you kind of come from the bottom up so my question uh i mean feel free everybody kind of to ask what's your most urgent question what i found when i partnered with ibm right like i did this before and i generally run commuter software engineers who are in this kind of pool model right normally they're motivated by by actual needs because there is a whole economy of startups and enterprises and you know stuff needs to be done right like you come in and it's very clear you know here's the business going on you need to process this data find out why are the customers not buying stuff why are they leaving why is fraud happening right uh why is chart happening uh or you just need to convert a bunch of like you know a terabyte of json into sql right like it's very clear what needs to be done right and so uh now developers come into this field uh with the same kind of mentality they want to get their hands dirty and then they immediately ask questions like you know and it's always kind of uh it's never getting you know it's always fresh like people come and say what is the api like is there a compiler right and i am kind of dumbfounded a bit because i kind of know there is not an api or a compiler in the traditional sense and so but but you know this question never gets old so kind of what i want to understand let's say you are a developer and so you have this very basic questions right you have the notion of a computer as an input and output and a processor and a compiler and a traditional computer have registers right and so somebody mentioned like we're in the anyak stage remember anyak the first computer uh at least according to the americans um and so i actually went to grad school at university of pennsylvania and aniak is actually there at the moore school of engineering at the ground floor and when um uh there was a 50th anniversary of uh uh computing according to association for computing machinery uh we had a visit from al gore who invented the internet then vice president of the us you know jokingly who claimed you know actually he didn't but you know there was a joke that because he promoted uh important internet laws and so the anyak was uh updated and uh restored and actually counted from uh 100 for 100 years of computing you know 50 past and 50 future and so the eniac is programmed by basically connecting you know like this telephone exchange you can connect cables into sockets right and it now that it just reminded me of all the quantum gates right so like one way we program with things we manually assemble this this architectures of programs right and so are we at the stage of anyak i mean even at this stage you don't need to know how transistors were collapsed right because so so developer so it's like a kind of my feeling is again prove me wrong but developers don't need to know how qubits work they need to know some basic characteristics the qubits are noisy and basically like this is as far as probably they need to know you know how reliable are our qubits and what are the operations composing them together it's just you know the question is how far away from the point where and first of all what happens at the quantum computer how do we actually make these architectures you know are they programmatic or is there any hardware which needs to be connected using this cable so like i we're at the stage where the whole thing is in software there is no need to do cables anymore or are we at this stage we still don't need to do cable so what happens in a very basic form you extract a bunch of data from you know your corporate sql database right and you need to solve like a pharma problem a protein folding problem right so i wonder why is like there is no resource which tells you in exact excruciating detail what happens you know you extract the data using classical computing you know using json processing python java like here's the where it ends here what happens when you put it into the quantum computer here's what actually you know happens at the physics level here's the interface like so so i'm i don't know if just me but i really need to develop a feeling where classical input is done and where quantum takes over what happens then is the architecture of computer hardware configurable do you need to reconfigure it for for a task or is it fully software defined and what does it mean and then how do you capture the output and how does it end up in a traditional sql database and maybe then on my macbook through a browser so i wonder if anybody can i can talk to that right because i generally don't see that covered end to end right people either zoom in on one thing or the other but i wonder if that did anybody see that is it a valid question to ask like right because developers are asking this so how would like does anybody here have an answer to that or a pointer to like if any of these resources help you to put together end-to-end understanding so so um i i think i might have an answer to that because to because you you're asking about i want to know how how i how the process works from from start to end exactly and the end okay so i think a way to grasp that would be working again on a project and um so i wanna i wanna briefly mention something else i think right now in quantum computing we have uh two kinds of people one is the expert so that person for example could be uh an expert in super conductors right and he or she could be very good with connecting superconductors to some part of a circuit and that person doesn't need to know about the grow research algorithm that person can be very good at at at their job where and then we have uh um i call these people conduits if that makes sense but they are the the facilitators of discussion and they they connect the the experts together so these people are the are the people like uh the people who write the books and then the the people who host stuff like like you alexey quan conversations so these people are are are more worried about the process they want to know or they teach what's going on in a higher level and for me what i think the the the the part where i understand one process fully was was again my project on annealing and i can get into the details of that process if you want alexi but uh but but again like as an overview that's when i learned about the whole process what happens when i put uh well i i so i started jupiter notebook i connect to the dba computer i have a classical thing that i want to solve and um what happens from end to end uh that's how i learned through uh a new uh a process in quantum computing and we right now we have to rely i think at every point we will have to rely on uh on classical methods because we are classical beings we are not quantum beings so uh we have to somehow uh transform that knowledge into stuff that we that's useful to us as human beings uh so we'll always have in some sense hybrid methods although we kind of like that divide methods into hybrid and fully quantum i think it's always going to be hybrid because we are classical uh but again yeah that's that's how i i am i'm i i highly recommend like doing working on projects it's also good for the world to build something and uh i think that's the only only proper way to learn cool thank you mark i wonder you know i mean could we do something like that given that you know uh ibm supports us in the sense as a community they probably can get us some access to the q network can your project for annealing be reproduced on the ibm q network i wonder if you know there is something that i mean you can lead or you know somebody can do right to give us the feeling like that is that something i mean was it a part of this ibm summer school i mean like because like i agree like you know doing a project would help but obviously if you are new at this you know it you you kind of kind of spend another amount of time just staring at stuff not knowing what to do first so it would be best to have somebody uh i mean tutor and and and work for folks through something like that so i wonder if you know that's like what you did was it highly bespoke and you needed to kind of do a lot of uh kind of uh hard work figuring it out or is this something which can be now followed uh with ibm q network um so i yeah i could talk about it but it wouldn't be replicable in ibm's hardware because they are gate based so it would have to use another hardware provider which is d-wave and i think they are competing with ibm so uh ibm wouldn't like that too much i guess but uh um yeah but i would i would love to talk about the process like as a part of a of a network yeah cool cool no that's great that's awesome address uh unless someone else says something no no please go ahead another part of your question but i'll wait a second maybe someone else wants to jump in first who hasn't talked please uh please go ahead uh i have a question i don't know if someone i put in the chat in here yeah we can hear you okay um i was just i was wondering if there's a kind of order of learning things so a lot of people are starting at different uh parts of their education they have different backgrounds so i was wondering if there's an order for every person to get where they wanted to go there's an easy answer for that it really the obvious answer in anything nothing to do with quantum computing you're trying to learn something new uh uh chess for example which i don't know let's say i wanted to it depends on your background and experience uh you sound from your voice probably uh in the spring of your life right you're probably just finishing college in your 20s gene i'm actually just starting okay so even that's my point i'm in my 70s so right there is a big difference uh alexi's a professional uh other people are just in various stages of school some people are marketing people uh some are programmers so i think an ideal path is a function of from whence you came there is no one uh best path simply why there's no one best book there's just more and more paths am i no yeah i i agree with nathan but but also uh there are some things that are maybe more fundamental than others so like i mean maybe i'm very biased to how i did things but i would highly recommend linear algebra if that was not obvious wrong i wouldn't say that with that i agree um linear algebra is necessary and since you're starting college right it's a linear algebra as a first year i mean first year undergrad course so also it's linear it's easy relatively uh to other math so it's uh in that sense we're blessed it's understandable it's digestible that's my word for it yeah i mean linear algebra is great and beautiful and i think it's it makes things much clearer but i wouldn't say it's necessary it's not like an obsolete uh starting point it's not necessary what would you replace it with i as you said i totally agree with two nates and like everyone has their own starting point everyone has their own path for example one person who doesn't know anything about uh linear algebra could get open up ibm q or something and spend their one minutes of time following tutorials and uh coding stuff up and just thinking of just circuits no one has to know about uh a heritage operator right you don't have to know that you can just code things up but true yeah in that sense it's true you have an interface you have that orchestra you know that beautiful uh musical architecture they use that's true yeah yeah so again it depends on you sean yeah yeah i just don't want to like i love math and i i think linear algebra algebra is like it's beautiful but uh uh yeah but but yeah people would maybe like start the field from another perspective and they might be uh again like an expert in their area and it might be the case that they don't use the algebra at all right right yeah no i i so if you're someone who's more experienced coding stuff and looking at code and seeing developing your intuition from there uh that also probably helps but i i personally started at vector analysis and doing much uh matrix analysis so i took linear algebra right yeah yeah that's just what i was uh regarding your first question on the chat i i couldn't uh type and listen at the same time but uh there's a new uh uh there's a new paper or or also videos i think on a new uh field you asked about grammar algebra and nlp uh quantum nlp just uh is the emerging field and uh bob koecke from oxford and right uh yeah amateur recently published in this area so if you're interested i would check that out i actually actually went to one of his uh one of the talks that's how i that's why i got interested in it cool cool so i think they also use uh heavily zx calculus in their work and categorical uh category theory and categorical quantum mechanics and this mit topos institute have a course on category theory so that's where i'm planning to start my zx calculus journey so maybe you would want to check that out too if you're interested yeah it does yeah and alexa about your previous question from end to end are you talking about getting to know more about compilers and [Music] well i mean first of all i you know uh because there is so much work done in with simulators right uh i really want to see i don't know if people have the same need but right um i mean like in in we've seen an example like we did you know had a kind of a study group uh with some friends and so kind of you know it was a q awesome program right so you set up kind of a random walk for an old random walk and so you start basically by defining a circuit so my immediate question is you know is this a circuit like anyak other cables need to be connected or is it you know a state of you know qubits which basically you know like you have how do you actually program this how do you get data in it right you initialize it what does it mean and similarly right so so basically i i want to have a very kind of basic understanding of the quantum computer and and then how do you put data in it if it's you know not like random walk where you just randomly initialize stuff now you have actually to set states of things from classical data then you can read it back right so so first of all i want to really uh understand how this is done and then i actually want to you know maybe it's just me my you know like a former physicist but i really want to see that like i want like is there any way for me to observe right like let's have this quantum computer i want to know here is you know how is the the classical bits are actually set right here is how the computation happens then here's how they are read because that in my mind this kind of learner i am they that would influence my uh further kind of understanding because you know linear algebra is a very abstract way to model everything so obviously if you have a an array of qubits you know which are basically governed kind of by linear algebra our understanding right i can then uh uh connect my understanding of linear algebra through this physical system but the physical system in my mind at least for me comes first if you look how children learn my 12 year old he disassembles everything he he wants to unscrew the screws he wants to like he gets a toy with an you know led he wants to take out actually the screens right and see like he wants to see the buses and then he takes a naked screen and connects with something else so i it's probably uh how a lot of people learn they need to see the physical they need to develop an intuition for the machine right so for me it's more important because then i will figure out what do i need from linear algebra i don't want to start with lagrangian and hamiltonian and so forth because these are abstract concepts which people developed over centuries you know going from classical mechanics and and and physics but you know like we uh i need to start with the physical system and i need to actually see it works maybe you know it's all in our imagination so uh i just wonder like if people are comfortable jump into the physics and quantum mechanics courses or some people cannot do that before they actually see the thing work so for that maybe i think you need some understanding of quantum mechanics to sort of appreciate what is happening because and it also depends on the on the underlying system right so if it's super conducting or if it's photonic or ion trap the entire i mean so what you're doing is you're manipulating a quantum state which is a vector onto another quantum state which is another vector right the linear algebra aspect it's it's the same but physically how you do it sort of varies a lot so for example xanadu in canada which is a photonic quantum computing group so they are looking at measurement based quantum computing which is fundamentally different from psy quantum which is another quantum computing photonic group which uh also it's photonic but they do a very different thing and it's so physically i mean so i can't uh at least for now i mean i can't directly see how you can first develop a physical intuition but then again that's because my i'm a pure theory person and zero experimental experience so uh but yeah and uh so for super conducting h almost we here uh i mean people who work on it here are working on superconducting devices and they and it's mostly i think like you said like it's not cables anymore you don't by hand set the cables but it's electrical pulses so you send you have a you have a circuit that you make from superconducting materials uh so you have something called joseph's injunctions which are made from superconducting materials they're like they're like a transistor but different because you have a whole set of different physics and then you make circuits out of that like normal circuit and so those circuits are your qubits and then you send electrical pulses to it to apply your gates and you couple different qubits through capacitors and it's for me it's a very messy thing that goes underneath and so the gates you apply are the pulses that are the electromagnetic pulses that you apply to those superconducting circuits right and so i know that kisket has like different layers of uh i don't know the names it's kiskit terra aqua and something else and uh it's like on the top of the stack where you just work with quantum information you don't bother about the underlying hardware and then you also have a way to control the signals that you apply at the hardware level to sort of maybe optimize your performance of the algorithm that you want to apply according to your application so maybe that's of interest right you could check out uh the kisket layers i think it's aqua but i'm not sure also a cqc right cambridge quantum computing that mert was talking about they have a compiler called tkt which is uh which does this sort of same thing it's like you give them a program it compiles the program into the the pulses that you apply that you want to apply to your quantum computer and it takes care of that and yeah so yeah so to summarize like two points it's it's highly dependent on what kind of hardware people are using and i think it's very messy but yeah i definitely agree so yeah again like i i was gonna say the same thing so alexi the the problem with that is first of all you can't have a quantum computer at your house right now right i don't think you would ever have a quantum computer at your house also this is recorded if like 30 years later everyone has a quantum little quantum computer at their house i don't want to one of those people who are always you could have one but i'm saying that it's highly unlikely uh but uh again the problem the problem with that is like getting uh uh something and like unplug uh unplugging it and like taking screws apart seeing what's inside um the thing is there are so many versions of of quantum computers as rishi said so and this reminds me like this reminds us of like the classical computing age as you mentioned like anyak and all of those so before anyak um also there were many technologies right uh not as much as we have right now for quantum but there were a few attempts of building uh classical computers there we had the the the mechanical ones and then were cubed what tubes came along and then transistor was uh formulated at ting bell labs but i might be a mistake there's actually a great book by uh walter isaacson uh called innovators that tells about the history of of of computing so i when i when i read through the book i i realized that we are in a very similar uh stage where computers are big and clunky and messy as rishi said um but we also we're also in some in some sense at a worse uh version of it because there are so many technologies and there's some so much attempt uh so many attempts to to build those and on top of that we have the coherence so uh quantum mechanics is by itself a fickle uh thing that every time you you interact with it it decoheres so you can't keep something in in the quantum level so it's really hard to actually like interact with the thing uh and i guess for for uh for people who want to see the whole process and who wants want to see what's going at the physical level that's gonna be a hindrance at least at the start until we have simpler uh and uh simpler machines that and then we after we see which technology works best and yeah like say just to add final comment you're not alone in this that you would people would like to see what is going from end to end right because right now it's very sorry but uh so ibm recently maybe not recently but had a round table talk where it's a whirly from stranger works was there and this is exactly the same discussion that they were having what that the people need to come and break things in different ways to sort of get the field moving ahead right like you said you have to sort of see what happens if i do this but you're not intended to do that i don't know what happened what happens if i do that and that sort of conversation going on so maybe i can put a link to that also in the chat and then that's it's basically the same conversation uh but much better much more yeah that will be great to see yeah i can add one more thing uh at that link please add that link yeah sure right now i can add one more thing about uh there there i feel like we're in an era where we don't know what the transistor is and we don't know what the technology is that will be the underlying physical layer i'm speaking more from a theory side so i i don't presume like a ton of knowledge here but i do think that the circuit model for quantum computing is many people are developing at least algorithms based on the circuit model and there are a couple simulators that you can play with the like quantum circuits using the gate based model computing and you can see the resulting probabilities and you can implement algorithms that people know like qaoa or like shore's algorithm on these simulators and that gets you kind of something close to the physical computation but because that underlying layer is so um system dependent i think like this is like an interface that i know some theorists have uh aligned on i'll send a couple simulator links in the chat thank you i've put the round table in chat right these guys i mean that was kind of my question because but maybe it's kind of my own kind of genetic predisposition because i noticed my son is like that right and so um again you know when we started learning computing we kind of assumed transistors are given right like we you know classical community was really way beyond that stage so canal is right in i mean this is what i hear that you know qubits are different uh there is this and that but that's fine like there is not infinite amount of those right so i guess we can still develop intuition at least for instance given that ibm q network is the most broadly accessible one that's kind of probably makes sense right and and kisked seems well documented so you know as rishi you you you talked i just googled like kisked pulse and i immediately got into some kind of layer there right so like it's easy i at least i can follow that and so that gives me an idea so that's fine uh that kind of gives me some pointers uh this is just what i wanted to ask if you guys feel other like pressing concerns which kind of where you want to start please please ask this because this is kind of for us all to to address that right and obviously it's a safe place like people come from different backgrounds like uh nathan said so it's really there is no wrong questions you i mean my my kind of uh present question was end to end i wonder what we heard linear algebra i wonder what people feel like other things they need to get out of the way before they can learn yeah i just wanted to talk a little bit um i think these are two really big before we close this uh these topics out i've kind of taken alexis question and uh john paul's question because i think they're two huge areas for discussion i just wanted to give a little bit of my input so um so maybe starting with um alexis question i think the whole quantum computing industry right now we're in this stage where um we're searching for the killer app so we're in the nisk era you know google did the supremacy thing but there's a huge bridge to go from where that is to fault tolerant quantum computing where you have very useful you know business applications um in production and all that type of thing so right now we're in a very primitive area um so without that thing that gets really people gets people really excited like oh look what's going on in finance looks what's going on in pharmacy um there's a lot of cool ideas but there's a disconnect because some of that's with pencil and paper it's not really with with code yet uh just because the hardware isn't isn't good enough and uh you know mentioned qtb i think q2b uh qc ware put out like a really good analogy right now where uh they talked about the railroad and like promontary point so right now we're in this stage where the the algorithm and the theory people are getting better and better and they're improving and they're reducing the amount of resources that we need um they're working on one end and then there's another end where it's the hardware people and they're scaling up they're doing more hardware and you know we haven't come together and put the golden stake in primary point yet um to really you know say okay quantum computing's there so this kind of nisk area where it's very primitive a lot of it is toy models a lot of it is you know just going through the you know just the kind of boring mechanics of it and it's you don't necessarily get to that useful like business app at the end of the day um so i think some of the stuff that the annealing people do um you do see that where it's like okay we're this is a component that i can put together and and put in production so i i don't know that much about annealing but like it's something cool like at startup like chicago quantum was like okay they're they're initializing they're putting 40 different stocks in the profile portfolio and then they run their optimization and they get something at the end and it's it's cool to look at but i'm sure rishi and mer probably know more about that than myself but and then going back to and then going back to um learning stuff i got a whole lot of overlap with uh the stuff that that rishi and and mert were mentioning so um i guess that's just because i'm a junkie for all the different content that's out there online so i started with itunes u and it was like a good place to get all these resources with different theory classes and math and physics and everything um so i kind of am aware of a lot of resources that are out there there's just so much diversity even within something like quantum mechanics and quantum information it's like if you want to learn from an engineering angle there's like david miller's course from stanford if you want to learn you know the physics stuff um and i'm looking at grad schools right now so some of them are double e some of them are computer science some of them are straight physics theory um there's just a huge amount of diversity out there even within the field so yeah if you're starting out like john paul i mean yeah the basic stuff is yeah like linear algebra stuff and vector calculus that's like you know the foundations a lot of that stuff and and diff eq and all of that but um you'll probably pick that up stuff quick and then you know it's just a matter of finding what you like and what you know course or whatever you you like and just just sticking with it so i don't know if i'm gonna bust out my bookshelf but uh i think everybody's kind of showed their books off already but yeah there's just so many different resources i'll just say uh to wrap it up uh there's a course from a guy from georgetown and i met him once it's like quantum mechanics for everyone and he says he has like 100 different books just on quantum mechanics and you know this everybody has their own different take on it so it's just interesting so i just wanted to say that thanks which uh so where do you find these courses i i miss that uh all the courses um so this was like a long time ago um itunes u used to have a lot of the mit ocw stuff that was on there and then once corsair and edx popped up i mean if you just put quantum into edx there's about 50 different courses that pop up so like even before i did the mit x pro series preceded that was the um the courses in quantum information science by hero and shore and um um oh yes so i think edx probably has more quantum courses than corsair but i'll mention too this one like if you're more into differential equations uh victor golinski um from the university of maryland charles clark have a corsair course i took it like six years ago but they recently put that back online um i mentioned david miller's course from from stanford that's another different one that wasn't mentioned um but yeah there's at you know corsair at x as far as like the theory stuff oh yeah the other thing i want to mention as far as there's two different things so getting back to what alexi was saying like stanford silicon valley person i think i mentioned this a while ago but uh there's an interesting concept from matt forstaggi who's in minneapolis um he's in a healthcare company and he's building an internal team that has some quantum capabilities so they divorce they kind of have two areas so you have your concept area and he was using the mit x pro siri to just teach the concept where it's like the quizzes are easy it's more conceptual the math is you know pretty basic and then they don't even and then they just focus on programming so just straight programming i was going to post in the chat right now eric johnson's book so mert mentioned the cmu course and that's more where they just focus on the programming uh so that's an o'reilly text that's in there and it's like okay and i talked to the professor from cmu and he said yeah they're just trying to yank as much of the theory out as they can and just focus on the programming because that's what the kind of students go for so if you just like need to get started um quickly um that's one possible path it's just it's finding the path that's right for you because there's a real diversity in the field like there's a lot of different ways to learn it cool yeah there's so much stuff right yeah i have one thing to add i don't know everybody's always talk about linear algebra but and they forget probabilities like one of the important things on on quantum is like getting understanding this uh notion of uncertainty of having like multiple results on different and how it's embedded in quantum mechanics i i guess is a really important thing that i guess as a physicist i learned quantum mechanics due to all the calories and then after when i did a little bit of probability i said oh this is are the same ideas but apply it in this new system and even i don't know aronson in his book he says oh forget about all the physics there's nothing quantum computing is is just probability applied in complex numbers so it's a is a really interesting thing to to have in mind uh yeah i i also think like alexa maybe there are things like just having this operational way of thinking in quantum mechanics is applying gates on everything it's trying to forget about all the all these operations that happen behind but you have like this this new uh black box that you give the inputs and you have the outputs and you have to learn through that i i found in one of the videos of kiskit they basically they show these kisket blocks i show the link is like how to practice your your understanding on how the operation works is that like a minecraft clone but using a lot of quantum operations so you have to solve like puzzles doing like quantum logic to find out that i found it really interesting of spending some time that i don't have so yeah i definitely agree uh uh with the probability part i think it's more uh necessary than linear algebra i think she's gonna object to that but um i'd go for uh what i found interesting was the probability is straightforward we're very grateful grateful or lucky for that it's classical probability for the most part expectation values average and most is from what i see most of it is around based on expectation value that's a classical concept it's known as the high school concept so i'm glad to get that one uh that was almost like a freebie um no look the probability is pretty like surprisingly easy but no i mean if you go into more complex things i agree with uh i guess though having like good understanding of what a random variable is and and so on definitely helps right so you yeah i mean the sad thing is you need a lot of it so you need everything so it's uh yeah it's difficult to say this more than that it's again where you start from so like nathan will say i think this is like a great field uh to get into because you can like uh do whatever you see fit and whatever is more uh entertaining for you and then you just in the end you're at the stage where you you have you you learn about many things not that i'm qualified to be anyone's a career counselor at all but for someone who's in the winter of their life for you guys who are like in your spring and summer there's a great future in this really it's i think it's kind of intellectually i just think professionally you know you ended up doing well uh no matter whether you're 20 or 50 uh there's that's that's i don't think it's gonna it might not grow as fast as we'd like i hope i see it in my lifetime probably not but it's definitely on the upswing right yeah this is something that i was super awful yeah it's like uh that was i mean uh so when i was taking a course in lubin uh one of the professors that they did their phd in spitronics and after their phd all the funding in spentronics just stopped apparently and they had to switch to some bio stuff and i was like oh no is this going to happen quantum for a while then but now i'm more convinced because i mean even if it's i'll it's fine i'm more certain my way is in quantum now but thanks nate that's that's that's good to know yeah one thing that i guess that we can leverage is that having all this information like almost for free and having this this is like a change of paradigm it's like having everything accessible is like going to courses of any university on the planet that's posting that it's like you you want to have a time to to see everything so i i guess like maybe you can choose knowing like or being like a specific and very specialist in one topic or you can be a generalist and try to pick it from everywhere but i guess like you will have to see what fits you more because it's like people that i i like looking at everything and knowing a bit of everything and i'm not saying i'm just the expert on how to tweak a circuit to do something but i know people that doesn't work like that so maybe you will as you're starting like your career you have to try out and you have a lot of time and i know a lot of resources or maybe opportunities that present in your life is i don't know yeah i guess though maybe a side track do you know that the zx calculus has like a discord server that you can join and they host weekly talks and stuff oh no no i don't know check it out i i would highly recommend that they're very they're also a good community so uh oh i didn't hear you who's that again please slowly oh right so it's uh it's it's another field called zx calculus so like jean paul was talking about uh i don't know how related it is but the same people are working on it this quantum natural language processing by cambridge quantum computing i believe they use zx calculus yeah that's uh kirka bob yeah yeah exactly so uh dramatic programming right yeah yeah yeah so they they also have a book uh called uh diagrammatic programming i think uh with the dodos picture exactly yeah and uh so i haven't read it but uh they also say that it's it's a it's a way to get started on looking at quantum from beginning they don't assume anything uh that you need to do and i have been working with tensor networks which is another diagrammatic approach and i love it and it's it's it provides like a very straightforward perspective on what quantum advantages and when sort of algorithms can work and when they may not so recently there was a paper by miles schrodmeyer and weinital i don't know if i'm spelling their names correct hope they forgive me but that said that uh lossy circuits are easy to simulate classically right and that sort of put this and puts in question like google's experiment is it uh easy to simulate classically there's it's still an archive so it's still there's debate on it but they use tensor networks and matrix product states to sort of count to that conclusion and i can i mean i can appreciate that because tensor networks is awesome and yeah so zx calculus they have a discard channel server uh so maybe if you write to me later i can send you an invite or whatever and also bob's book it's superb thank you thank you rishi yeah by the way you know we kind of said that this is going to be our holiday party so i'm raising the glass of duval to all of you great folks you know so maybe you know i i just wonder right so um maybe you kind of ask kind of a general life question uh i wonder what do folks want to do with this right so uh how many of you guys uh want to make a career in in quantum computing and what does it look like right now i mean i kind of write like i mean i like murder i think it's a great example because i see like merc did this internship at qc where right now i can like a uh and uh right but like uh so you you know you can get a um a degree or you can learn online course i just wonder what folks want to do uh with it eventually right like do you want to work in this field and if you do like what what what do you think the work will look like honestly i i i wasn't like i didn't have in my mind that i work in this field when i started reading about it but it it just like uh i can't seem to escape it like it's just i'm seduced that i i just can't leave it so i thought i would be like uh uh a product manager or like a a quantitative trader something like that does like math you know in a daily basis but i i i didn't even think that when i first started that there were career opportunities uh for for people interested in quantum computing because this was like like five years ago and it was still like an emerging uh field um one thing i i wanted to mention is when john was here so we we work with john uh on on uh on the quantum workforce and it seemed it seems to many people that you need a phd to be a researcher or at least an expert in the industry and uh we're starting to see this uh shift uh towards towards uh towards uh degrees that you can obtain in a smaller time so um especially for software jobs so for programmers so i i went to uh a huge list of job listings in the quantum industry and i saw that people are actually um hiring more and more undergrads and master's graduates uh if they have if they are looking for programmers of course if if they're looking for someone to like uh create a josephine junction and work and maintain like a super conducting circuit there they ask for a phd but even this is like shifting i think and hopefully like as the as the field matures there will be more work related opportunities and uh yes i would i would love to be in the in this in this field in industry i would be working on something that i do on my free time and i would make money that would be wonderful so that's that's what i'm trying to do exactly the same for me right so for me uh during my electrical engineering i was still interested in physics i actually wanted to major in physics but then [Music] yeah i didn't because for the reasons and i was learning quantum mechanics in my i mean i was not learning the courses that i was supposed to but i was following physics courses on youtube and now i'm doing that and i'm i'm i i i can call it productive work right super happy for it and i would like uh so i'm so more excited for the theory side uh the algorithms and uh what sort of applications that you can get out of this and what when you can get quantum advantage and when you can't and so mostly the complexity theory side that can use some others we're talking about so yeah yeah i'm super excited also okay is it is it um hello sorry uh i'm kind of interested in doing research in general i'm interested in uh what will and won't be possible with quantum and yet yes quantum algorithms but also all quantum technology so like you said complexity theory and uh i've been i've been reading about systems systems thinking and impact and leverage points and stuff like that so i really want to know even even without like a person with a quantum computer how how is this going to impact that person's life i don't think many people have answers to that so it's a good it's a good place to it's a good place to work right some like media allows to hype quantum computing and this was like ai uh five years ago machine learning 10 years ago or it might be switched but like um and then vr which reality also like a few years ago so um i don't think people will notice something different in their lives uh for a bit at least but the the stuff that we we are at this as researchers we are we're able to do and then industry people working on deep tech that's gonna change uh drastically so so i i don't think like someone who doesn't know about quantum computing and doesn't care about deep tech that much would notice anything different in their life guys for the next 10 years again these are not uh i don't i don't want to be held accountable for these claims but i think that for the next five years at least we're we're going to see any dr dramatic change in in the in in the average joe's life uh but we'll see we'll see that we are able to solve many more uh problems that are impossible to solve with classical computers even if you have like the best computers all of the materials in the in the universe like built into the amount computer you you would not be able to solve those problems unless you have a different way of computing so um those are definitely going to open doors and what you can do what you can do as rishi said we don't know so the theory side that's why it's interesting right there's always more theory coming out we and we don't know if if we can do actually more stuff or stuff exponentially faster with quantum computers for many of the problems that are proposed to run faster on quantum computers so that's why it's it's exciting to work in this field yeah maybe if i can add too much statements it's that maybe even when you have fully functional quantity computers the average person will not directly know that the difference in their lives is coming because of quantum computer right yeah so you may i mean people all over may change their encryption from rsa to some quantum lattice encryption but mobile internet or like mobile banking will work the same and people don't even most i mean the average person doesn't even know what rsa is right now right so they may not change i mean they may not understand sort of the underlying changes but uh it'll definitely change but it's an interesting question right so it's kind of similar with ai uh not many people know how ai works or that they may be interested in it but they don't know how like impacts their lives but if you're on spotify i mean or netflix that algorithm knows you better than you know you knows exactly what you want to consume next well the thing about ai is it's relatable right because we all have something the eye part at least intelligence uh so it's at least relatable so people know about it like uh like my grandmother at least knows about ai but she does she doesn't really like know about quantum computers so um quantum computers are very uh they're not very relatable to our everyday experience they're not something that we can think about or have a have a metaphor for at least we don't have a metaphor for uh quantum mechanics so it's really hard to like relate to that so what what media uses usually is the cryptography stuff like uh we're gonna break the rsa codes with uh short algorithm and uh blah blah blah uh quantum hacking uh china is gonna uh hack usa like the media allows to hype these things up but again as rishi said most fundamental changes in science and technology don't have an effect on people's lives that's directly observable that they make people's lives easier and people don't really notice these because they are not uh changes for the good and people uh are are um are better at adapting to to uh these good changes but if something like bad happened then people would realize uh like uh and that that i don't think is gonna be the case in terms of like how the media portrays quantum in terms of like hacking and security issues because we already have stuff that are uh are not penetrable to quantum uh we have quantum proof uh security protocols even before the the hardware up there although i agree with mert that i think quantum computing is still in the fundamental areas of science i do think that we do not know the full potentials of quantum computers and so while we're saying that like it won't impact people's lives we don't know what quantum computers can be used for there were some recent papers in recommendation algorithms people trying to do augment machine learning with quantum computing and then there were some proofs that the quantum algorithms were just as good as regular algorithms so why do you need a quantum computer but people are pushing at other you know crazy problems saying can a quantum computer be useful here and i think the the most popular application that we know will work is in this rsa encryption factoring so i think that's why there's more media exposure there but if there are other really surprising discoveries on what quantum computers can do then i think it may impact people's lives it just depends on what they are right totally right and fun fact on what canal said the person who showed that the recommendation algorithm the quantum proposed quantum algorithms i mean there's a classical equivalent for that was an 18 year old right so uh their name was evan tang and they were scott anderson student and so yeah it's it's it's it's there right that's super cool and also uh i forgot my the second point oh yeah no i had a question to martha but uh if it's like uh but it's it's uh it's based on d wave and uh so i mean feel free to not answer it so it's uh i mean could you comment on this uh the amount of entanglement in d-wave systems is that because a while ago i think that was a huge debate and then uh how quantum uh right sorry i mean uh so the d wave qubits do they have a lot of uh entanglement between them or do you know about yeah i i i'm not sure i don't i think the wave is built on uh on that thing yeah so the hardware is super connected but um so it's super coma conducting flux qubits but uh the the way it works is it's it's not like our regular gate based circuit-based model where you entangle qubits it's work more like you have some quantum fluctuations and you kind of exploit the uh a dibiatic competing model where you move uh hamiltonian using a transverse field and keep it at the ground state uh to a problem that you want to solve and if it's at the ground state when you uh when you're done with your cycle you have a solution to your problem but the thing about uh antibiotic computing is it's really hard to do so instead you have annealing where the you have all the fluctuations while you're going through this process and these fluctuations uh sometimes can lead to improvements that's what my research was on like in reverse annealing but i'm not i'm not sure about entanglement right okay yes it is an annealer uh john paul what's your question so you know guys one way i'm kind of thinking about this right so i'm um basically a community organizer in software engineering right and i partnered with ibm on ai and big data for the last five years right i mostly do my own independent um commit organizing in the bay area but kind of we partnered with this and folks who worked with me on ai moved into quantum so this is how i got uh interested in this right and so what i'm thinking uh kind of looking at the future um maybe i i wonder if you guys saw that right but uh you know startups do this customer driven pro you know product market feed right like the basics are the questions so there is this extreme school where you basically say you don't do anything until you talk to a thousand customers like you you talk to the customer you want to do like a you know a new dog product so you talk to a thousand dog owners right and you ask what do they what do they want for their dog because if you have an idea build it then they come you may be not not doing the right thing so i'm not sure if this is the right approach but i think you always have to do that right the question is it everything or you know steve jobs basically said like nobody would think about the iphone right like he came up with an iphone nobody would think of this except for steve jobs right he knew that you will need it so what i wonder if you guys seen maybe you've seen it like like i mean you can talk about customers people who see that but what do the customers think can we kind of crowdsource the meaning of quantum computing to a lot of people who worry about it so you know kunal mentioned the rsa right uh and rishi i mean i personally think that crypt is completely overblown i looked at the blockchain field and like it now devolved into cryptospeculation right remember we all talked about the world on the blockchain now it's all distributed finance it shrunk dramatically into you know a very specific area of crypto speculation and powered by cryptography like to my mind it's actually insignificant uh because you know it's you know it's no it's not obviously it's not like creating drugs it's not discovering oil and if you look at some of the customers who look at the quantum are axon right and they want to do exploration it's pharma they want to do protein folding and it's finance which basically wants to solve not cryptospeculation but they want to solve i think this quantum singularity you know problem where suddenly somebody will come and take the home like financial market by store so i see three three things uh at least i see the hearsay among the customers right so it looks to me it's kind of on the finance side it's driven by fear that you know somebody will emerge and one day the our ex will ring and they will come to the market the opening bell will ring and the subtle will defeat everybody right so i think this is probably what is driving this r d investment in uh in the top financial firms uh at least how i see it from the outside right and then i see the questions like obviously finding oil uh right obviously you know british petroleum extra they invested in big data before and if they see that as a way to to to find more of this you know that's kind of a very valid investment right you invest in exploration uh and obviously like protein faulting's billions are spent right so i can also see the department of defense i can clearly see they they cannot do nuclear testing right now rather constrained so they were doing simulation already in supercomputers i can very clearly see how they want to do it on quantum so i kind of see these four maybe areas i just wonder do you guys think that uh you know we can kind of look at these customers talk to them and kind of see what they're doing as a driver of this industry right is it kind of because like if we come from the startup approach we need to see what the customers want to do and then the solutions will be developed i just wonder what do you guys think about that um i think so there is a there was a research on this um there was a survey i can't try to find it i'm trying to remember the name it's not the way but it was a debate partner that did this they surveyed the customers and uh i think it's very comprehensive so i'll share that but uh from what i remember from it um people uh were interested in speed ups at least so not not really like uh like of a decent finance it wasn't like fear but more of a competitive advantage that they wanted to have for themselves um it was a key word you said there speed up uh i walked away for a second i might have missed it but what all those applications have in common we do know what we want quantum to be doing right it's very maybe i'm just being very naive it's so simple we want things to work faster that's the basic attraction right that's the sex appeal so to speak it all comes down to that and everybody wants that so i think the question you're asking alex is is well-intentioned but it's not well-formed it's almost impossible to answer uh there's answers on both end and the industry will drive itself right uh and i i just think it's fascinating that major companies every major company i.t company space especially uh google microsoft uh intel honeywell and so on there's some very smart people and those are profit-driven companies they can maybe put away 50 100 million on a goofball idea but they're putting in billions so there's obviously a lot of smart people who think that something's gonna happen unless it's the hurt instinct you know one person does it then the second person does it right a great way to hold an event is to go to you know get one sponsor like google and then go to microsoft and say hey you want to come to this event well i don't know but google's going to be there oh yeah well i'm coming and then you go to ibm and say you know microsoft and google are going to be an event of course they'll show up so there might be some of that going on uh but it's definitely on the momentum which is cool the rate of exchange you know the rate of ascent unpredictable but as long as it's moving up i'm cool so yeah and uh to add to that i mean i agree with both martin nathan and maybe just to say uh the one drawback that i could see just relying on customers or people for what they would expect or want to go into computer do is like kunal said we don't know the full extent of what the computers can do right so and uh so this going back to this roundtable discussion that they were having uh so this is exactly what they were thinking saying that so while he was saying that you need people you need developers to come and break things in thousand different ways and then for new applications to develop so so i mean so it's important of course that there are people who can pay for this and so the people that you have customers but it should also be i think research driven right because it's it's an i mean as a physicist it's an interesting question to ask like what is happening it's what's entanglement and then uh like why is this why is this doing that then why is it sort of being so spooky right so so i i would say that of course it is important that you have people to pay for it and you have customers but the research aspect is also equally important but this i have zero experience in anything else other than academia so yeah this isn't you know to me it's interesting that uh it's kind of it's a hybrid science slash applied field right so i clearly see the kind of jobs which will always be available are to learn and teach right basically you know the best way to teach something is to learn something is to teach it right so academia definitely will always be a source of jobs and so then um i think the current jobs in industry are kind of r d uh embedded in large companies and so you know some of this is kind of it's the best of all worlds because they pay as industry but they're structured as academia in a way right so i think this is kind of the dream jobs you can lend right now uh because apparently from what i understand the relationship between uh providers right like ibm and google and others who want to cultivate the technology with the customers is essentially a mentor student right like you it's not scalable yet you have to train phd level employees in this right and so you only can partner reasonably with big companies like morgan chase uh right uh or exxon which have uh an ability to do that and also what i don't know it's very hard to understand how people like goldman sachs are doing this because they're extremely secretive right so and in some strange way it's their antithetical academia because you do not talk about what you do in finance right so they swallow smart people and smart people always have a nurse to share and learn by collaboration but these guys have to stifle it by dropping large bags of money on them from all sides so they cannot talk to each other right so it's kind of uh i don't know really that's why like we have some folks from finance but they don't talk about it right and also people who do hardware they don't want to talk about it right so uh because it's it's a secret so so i i find it's very interesting that like we have some vestiges of academia but the industry forces uh basically make it you know it's not fully scientific because there is a lot of money to be had by the winners and that puts the whole pressure on this right and distorts i would say normal scientific exchange of opinion so as an open source guy for me it's very interesting how do you like maybe we can making draws from open source right maybe we can kind of see what we can share this is open source uh right and kind of maybe the jobs will be like i don't know if the jobs will be more like goldman sachs all the jobs will be more like google right like it's not yet clear to me where this whole thing is going uh so i i can clearly see that there is a subset of jobs which will develop i don't know what they will look like and i don't know how many folks here want to work in a secretive field like you don't talk about it like somebody will actually like will have to get the permission to come here i don't know if this is you know where the field is going i hope not right um i i actually i don't want to interrupt you alex but i i don't think it's as as as secretive as you say so people in in finance also publish papers uh they they just have some regulations that they can't talk about some stuff uh related to the company like goldman publishes papers i don't know about jp morgan but they also have a quantum team um and they're always in cooperation with universities and uh and also other other uh other industry industrial players also in their own own uh own game so it's it's like they're competing but they're also collaborating at the same time and uh and right now it's it's a it's a place where they're all into intertwined because it's everyone is doing research there's nothing else to do like you can't actually do something that's useful with the quantum computer um at the moment so everyone is doing research uh but it's gonna be more like you said i think as as as we move along and um people are gonna be more secretive and people are gonna try to hoard ip into their company uh but again i think it's it's it happened with many many many emerging fields right it's always the case where it starts in a lab people are doing research we have academic uh people from academy academia uh working on on uh theory uh and then uh there's more money flowing in and then people are like oh i can make more money out of this and that even drives more research then we have more smart people putting their time and effort into this uh and we have an industry in the end that's useful for everyone for the whole world so i i think it's a it's a process that that has been has been uh uh proven to work in in many other other industries but right now i i don't think it's as bad as you as you say it's not as as secretive at least right i mean i i personally noticed it because you know i i met some folks from uh hardware manufacturers and they would just not talk about it right because i think uh you know like at least in terms of songs where people will talk about it but people who make hardware seems pretty secretive you know because you know they don't want to say how far ahead they are right and and so that was interesting to me but again i'm a software guy not a hardware guy so i know they're extremely different i think you point something cool out of lexi and this is just an outsider's perspective um but yeah just kind of reminds me of ibm and google so like ibm has open pulse so a lot of that's open source and you can access it but they obfuscate some things because they don't want some hardware things being accessible or not and yeah now i've heard the same thing where it's like ibm and google don't really they they're using very similar um super conducting qubit technology but they don't really talk to each other and it's real kind of uh segregated but um but yeah i think some of that software stuff and same thing too like google i guess has their own software that they use they don't use um you know ibm stuff even though they're similar things so it's kind of a mix of both i think software is gonna it's just natural how it develops um in the classical sense software is gonna have to pivot towards towards open source is just the better way to go but yeah right now the hardware it does seem like they don't they don't talk to each other about the at least the people working on the bleeding edge the people that are competing against each other it seems like they're kind of siphoned off siloed off actually that reminds me in office range i mean i like history of computing remember the i think shortly who invented the transistor it was very had some very nasty personality right there was a lot of stuff involved in the early days right because transistors obviously they're underpinning of this and there was a lot of ip right and so kind of now i think it's still happening but we just do not you know seed percolating but obviously semiconductor industry like i mean now there is a transition to apple silicon even from intel right like there is a lot of tension who controls the processor right but it's just a different level so uh i think that's an interesting way right like like kunal said like we don't know what the qubit is like what we don't know what the transistor is like so whoever wins that race may dominate you know the rest so yeah i i don't know like maybe in some way we have to wait but in some other ways we cannot wait until we see who wins the transistor array so we have to kind of put the card ahead of the horse so cool so folks uh i think we're a bit kind of running over uh what we planned originally uh so i just wanted to kind of invite everybody to think you know i think we have a lot of pointers what about doing uh more kind of hands-on tutorials next year kind of making it more of a study group right so i think we kind of you know exploration versus exploitation stages i think we covered a lot of exploration in the first six meetings we kind of reviewed the feel right in my mind was like let's let's uh see where where things are who works in the field so we uh we start with introductions to kind of give people an idea where you're coming from right what you are working on and i think we have a lot of learners here so right so uh what do you guys think about kind of doing kind of uh more deep dives uh next year right so like i think mers project like end-to-end project that sounds to me like a great introduction linear algebra obviously emerged as the next thing right maybe uh somebody can cover physics uh and i think from some of the meetings before we had offers of this um one-on-one tutorials like we have physics from oxford right well i think alex kissinger uh offered to kind of do with his group more kind of couple more like two three hours hands on keyboard dive so i just wonder what do you guys think about that like would be uh folks be up for it uh is this something you can see yourself spending two three hours doing uh and can folks lead one of these things i would be super interested in that like uh learning zx calculus is something that i already have on my checklist and if like uh alex kissinger one of the people like main people who working on it can help me out of this like it's like a lottery right and so i mean i don't know uh my experience is very limited uh it's based on tensor networks and like the very small aspect of what i know but uh i'd be happy to help anyone who's interested in tensor networks so okay yeah i would be super interested i i'd agree i mean i got some exposure i think there are a lot of great tutorials uh the ieee quantum conference um kind of did a lot of that thing day by day and i thought that stuff was really awesome so i think if this group wants to do some of that i think that was i got a lot out of that type of experience so so yeah um that'd be i'd be all for that cool so yeah maybe you know what i'm gonna do next uh maybe we could work together on this right uh uh let's just like kind of send a questionnaire to folks what do they want to learn right maybe kind of propose some of these topics and and see who also can teach right because we kind of we need a self uh sustaining system where you know some people will teach and some people will learn right so that and obviously another question is you know do we need do we need quantum computers for this because i know that ibmq network can make some available so i just wonder you know uh like i think it would have a lot of more appeal if we had quantum computers like we don't need them simulators can do everything i guess that these the the circuit models can do uh well not most not everything uh but stuff that for educational stuff we could do everything with simulators but it would have a lot of appeal if you if you it feels different when you use a computer so um it would be great to have like uh ibm partner with us and give us access devices very cool so yeah i i'll work on that then you know as well right and see what they can make available and how because i think yeah i mean personally for me it's a game changer because like you know something happens there like there is actual qubit there is actual quantum state right you are affecting somehow to me it feels magical like i i want to to be able to do that and but then of course i need to see a proof of that because what if my toy problem is connected to simulator instead of quantum computer so so we need like we need we need to figure out how can we exercise actual quantum computer um and and like be sure we did uh so great so folks uh then you know let's do that so uh let's kind of um i'll share a survey right and so let's kind of uh um um see what we we're gonna do next and so obviously the next meeting will be the last wednesday of january which should be probably after everybody is back from the uh new year's holidays and hopefully a lot of people will get vaccinated right and so you know the world will hopefully reopen at some point we'll make like a you know i um normally run physical conferences of about a thousand top kind of uh computer scientists in the bay area so i really hope i will be able to do that in the area and so copper level partner of quantum you know stanford quantum and berkeley and others and the idea was always we'll take it around the world so when the water opens copper will partner with ibm bring it like to london and you know eu in some way too right so but before that like let's yeah let's plan some online online learning uh and so i'm super open like uh um i don't know you know exactly kind of what you know will happen in the next year but i really appreciate the folks kind of could help me i mean meredith and stanford quantum did a lot of great work already uh stepping up if folks want to help me organize this i would really appreciate it so rishi you know you're very welcome you i think it's you've been instrumental in this right uh i'm glad to see like new folks like nathan with the really cool resources so if any of you guys feel like you want to lead on this tutorials if you if you want to pick um like an area right carve out a direction where you want to do like for instance linear algebra you know feel free to take it and kind of propose to not just do one tutorial but a series because at this point i think we need to kind of set up a study group and you know we need to look kind of individual events but we also need kind of an idea whether this is going so let's plan some time uh spend some time planning that and kind of uh start new year and like really get more into learning i will uh nathan here i'll reach out to you when you do the survey you'll you'll you'll include your contact info yeah i'll reply absolutely i'll do that right so it looks like we're wrapping up but can we set up like a deadline on when to send the to the list that mert and i have so if i understand right what are we collaborating on making sure i mean if you can share by the end of the uh i guess like you know like one week or from the end of the year so i would say like no depending on your holiday plans i would say a week or two is fine right like you know right two weeks first of january 2021 yes okay yeah let's do that let's do that now so everything which we discussed uh you know i'll say i will save the chat obviously as well uh and kind of uh extract some of the urls but mert and rishi please converse on the google doc send it to me i'll publish it all right and we'll and and and also i'll mention what nathan has sent already and so hopefully we'll take it from there and you know and then if you have any idea of leading a tutorial let's discuss it in more in more detail cool and i want to thank everybody that was you know great here uh in in terms of learning so hopefully you know it will be even better uh next year thanks for making this series a success and thank for participation we'll learn something so cheers to you and i see you in the new year yeah thank you yeah i i hope see you everyone uh soon i think this is a really small field i i think i saw many of your faces before uh uh i'll see you guys again thanks for everything for coming everyone thank you thank you for having me and thank thank you for being here and also happy holidays bye see you cheers