A brief review of the QRISP Community Kick Off
Quantum computers are associated with the hope of achieving enormous leaps in computing power. To support developers in programming quantum computers, Fraunhofer FOKUS founded the Thinq Qrisp Community on September 10. The event brought together around 45 participants from industry and research.
In addition to networking opportunities, participants with basic or advanced quantum knowledge were able to take part in workshops. These were entitled ‘Quantum Computing - From problem description to implementation’ and ‘Advanced: Bring your own adder: Implementing a quantum multiplier with an arbitrary addition function’.
Workshop 1: Bring your own adder: Implementing a quantum multiplier with an arbitrary addition function (Advanced Workshop)
In this session the participants learned about many of the Qrisp programming primitives such as effective memory management, hardware specific compilation or algorithm modularization in a simple hands-on example. Starting from a Jupyter notebook with some initial information Raphael showed the participants how to implement a quantum multiplier using a limited pool of primitives. This multiplier was constructed such that at the end of the session the participants could even plug in their own adder.
Workshop 2 – From problem description to implementation (Basic Session)
In this session the participants could explore the basic steps that have to be taken, when a problem, that potentially can be solved with a quantum computer, is identified. To make it more tangible Sebastian led through these steps with a train scheduling problem as it might appear in a real-world scenario (just a tad smaller of course) and together with the participants arrived at a first basic Qrisp implementation. The basic steps include modelling of the problem, which was done in this case by using a graph representation, find the corresponding mathematical problem – graph coloring for the train station scheduling, and the solving this problem – done here with the Qrisp implementation of the quantum backtracking algorithm.
The Thinq Qrisp community has set itself the goal of working on new ideas for programming quantum computers. The aim is to bundle the activities of the quantum software engineering community and to network the individual players. At the centre of the activities is the Qrisp programming language developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS, which is intended to enable the commercial application of quantum computers for a broad audience of developers. As an open source project, Qrisp enables all users to learn, share and further develop the software together, creating a committed and growing community.
The event ended with an outlook on the next steps of the community and the opportunity to provide feedback (a feature of the community, which aims to integrate its members frequently).
We received positive feedback from the participants, which shows that interesting ideas were conveyed and initial interest was fuelled. The keynotes and interactive workshops were perceived most positively. It was also possible to identify which activities should take place in the future. The main requests were for webinars and techtalks and introductions to QRISP and tutorials.
We would like to thank everyone for their participation and interesting discussions and are already looking forward to further online and in-person events.