QCL – A Programming Language for Quantum Computers | Hacker News Reader

QCL – A Programming Language for Quantum Computers

itp.tuwien.ac.at

103 pointskushti21 comments

Unfortunately, a language like QCL is a bit far away from being a practical language for quantum computers, in the sense that it will be difficult to use on upcoming machines. QCL is of course perfectly fit for experimentation. In my opinion, when you have a quantum computer that has resources akin to a classical computer with RAM measured in tens of bits with stable lifetimes measured in tens of microseconds, using a language that is similar to C gives you a somewhat wrong impression of what you're able to do. While not universally true with C programming, C often abstracts away the idea of finite memory/stack/etc. This is generally a good idea when resources are plentiful. But this very sharply contrasts with near-term quantum computers. Of course, just as with C, one could imagine compiling QCL into a simpler language, with the expectation that QCL programmers can intuit what the compiler will produce as "machine code".

As discussed in a recent paper [1][2], it's pragmatic to think of quantum computation in a coprocessor model. QCL takes a different approach: a high-level language that has a quantum datatype in the midst of the traditional classical datatypes along with their plethora of classical operations. I think that cordoning off the quantum computation as much as possible into a separate processing unit will make eventual adoption much easier. It also makes integration with existing languages much easier. QCL doesn't preclude this idea, but having a quantum coprocessor model implicitly manifest in QCL makes its implementation very difficult.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03355

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277552

What do you think of it for pedagogical purposes? Even if it were impossible to implement, I wonder if an interface closer to traditional programming might lower some barriers to understanding what a quantum computer can do, and how a quantum algorithm might work. Perhaps "prototype in Python, rewrite the slow bits in C" could be adapted to quantum computing.

I think a problem with thinking "an interface closer to traditional programming" is that it's really difficult to get anywhere close to what traditional programming is in any meaningful sense. It, QCL, looks traditional because it looks like C with qubit registers (i.e., on the surface, "just another datatype"), but quantum programming is anything but C. No printf'ing quantum states, no qmemcpy, no qmemset, no stepping debugger, no hexdumping, etc. These things are more-or-less quantum impossibilities of ever having, and so we need to think about things in a new way. Trying to hang on to C(-like) programming for pedagogical purposes is more or less a lost cause. With that said, I do not claim that there is no utility in something like QCL. I just don't think it's right, right now.

A very rough analogy, I suppose, would be "let's make Haskell more accessible by doing away with monads and referential transparency". At that point, you've departed from the paradigm Haskell puts forth, and you actually haven't made Haskell any bit accessible.

Your second point about "prototype in Python, rewrite slow bits in C". There isn't, as far as I'm concerned, that sort of problem with quantum programming at the moment. Maybe in a decade or two. It is difficult enough to even get an algorithm working altogether, let alone reasoning about speeding it up. To reason about speedups, you need a framework in which you can reason about performance on some machine model. One such machine model is described in the aforementioned reference.

This guy has some amazing videos on the basics of quantum computing and QCL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6TsdwxcwM

I wish he had the people and support to help make animations and present the formulas in the correct notations. It starts to make sense though.

I want to get into quantum computing, especially since IBM has one you can play with on-line (your program queues up like old fashion punch cards):

https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/

..but to really use it, you need to know how these super weird quantum gates work. From what I can tell with QCL, everything a quantum computer can do, we can do with traditional computers. It's just that simulating 100 qbits takes an ungodly amount of memory and processing power. Quantum computers can't replace traditional computers, they're for a very specific problem space that can be defined with these quantum gate concepts.

Try the video series Quantum Computing for the Determined [1]

My simulator, Quirk [2], is a bit easier to experiment with than IBM's. But it still assumes you know the basics.

1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1826E60FD05B44E4

2: http://algorithmicassertions.com/quirk

Quantum programming done properly would much likely need some kind of functional / declarative programming language.

Similar to how the connection machines were programmed in *Lisp.

> no qmemset, no stepping debugger, no hexdumping, etc. These things are more-or-less quantum impossibilities of ever having

Unless there are good alternatives to this, a quantum computer will never execute anything more complicated than an algorithm.

A suggestion to the author: the documentation must be in HTML pages, not PDF files. That would help search immensely and make references much easier. Furthermore, how about loading the code on GitHub or the like instead of distributing tarballs? Both PDF and tarballs smell of 90s.

Actually I remember tuwien.ac.at from the times where I was downloading software sources from FTP mirrors in the early 90s, so that's a good nostalgic fit :-)

A suggestion for other researchers: start with a git repository and documentation written as .md files. Then write your thesis with LaTeX and export a PDF if you feel like, but for all the developers the source of truth will be the repository and the mds.

All of the docs on that site are from the early 2000's

I was reading the linked document titled "Quantum Programming in QCL" which contains the following definition of a Fibonacci function. As far as I can tell this thing calculates nothing like the Fibonacci sequence. Can anyone explain what the thinking is behind this code?

    int Fibonacci(int n) { // calculate the n-th
        int i; // Fibonacci number
        int f; // by iteration
        for i = 1 to n {
            f = 2*f+i;
        }
        return f;
    }

I don't even qualify as a novice, but it seems f(the first iteration) would need start with 0.

With this sequence of numbers 1,1,2,3,5,8 it seems to be calculating

f=0 as 2 * 0+1=1 ; f=1 as 2 * 1+1=3 ; f=2 as 2 * 2+1=5 ; f=3 as 2 * 3+2=8 ;

then f=4 should be 2*5+3=13

I'm not sure how 2 is calculated unless i=0, but this is why I'm not even a novice.

Adds new keywords "INDECISIVE OR", "MAYBE IF" and "PROBABLY EQUALS" :-)

Some recent work on rendering graphics with quantum computers: http://machinelevel.com/qc/siggraph/hello_siggraph_2016.html

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12405428

These languages have been around for some time. QML is another (http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~psztxa/publ/qml.pdf) as is Quipper (http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/quipper/).

It really needs a "show me the code" section, not links to a thesis.

I feel like quantum computers are getting all the spotlight but optical computers are every bit as cool and quite a bit more viable right now. Furthermore we do need to develop this industry because it would be ridiculous to still be using wires with quantum computers.

Kind of reminds me of how the boeing 747 was only ever meant to be a stopgap and everyone thought the real future was supersonic.

Optical computers will be drop in replacements for our current ones won't they?

I think at least in our generation, yeah. But who knows. There's also optical quantum computing.

For those interested https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-quantum-computa...

"Changes in 0.6.4: Dump format supports polar coordinates" made me laugh: I'm sure it makes a lot of practical sense, but my non-qubit-enabled brain can't fathom why that would be necessary!

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