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I'd like to begin working with quantum computers as a hobby. Is this possible?

  1. Where can I buy a quantum (personal) computer so I can run (my) quantum computer programs?

  2. What quantum computing programming languages are out there? Is there something like a compilable quantum computing programming language?

Any pointers to resources, tutorials are very appreciated.

I've read Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists and it's very interesting! Can't wait to begin programming.

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You best start by clearing out the attic, this' gonna take some space… dwavesys.com/en/products-services.html – deceze Jul 6 '11 at 12:39
@deceze And winning the lottery jackpot a couple of times perhaps :P – Raoul Jul 6 '11 at 12:44
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@deceze: Caveat Emptor – phresnel Jul 6 '11 at 13:09
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@Jeremy It's an odd question, but it's reasonably on-topic and would even be constructive if someone were to write up a serious answer (even if the answer is "you can't do that"). – Anna Lear♦ Jul 6 '11 at 14:11
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@Jeremy It's not a coding problem, for one thing. – Anna Lear♦ Jul 6 '11 at 14:31
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 6 '11 at 13:47

5 Answers

up vote 8 down vote

There is also a handful of quantum machine simulators, so you can save the money to buy more cats:

I guess http://www.quantiki.org/ is a good place for you.

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+1 for "buy more cats". You never know when they're going to die or not. – joshin4colours Oct 21 '11 at 13:39
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There is a great overview of quantum computing on the Software Engineering Radio podcast:

http://www.se-radio.net/2011/06/episode-176-quantum-computing-with-martin-laforest/

It doesn't answer your questions directly, but it might provide you with a better idea of the state of the art.

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Great technical introduction; exactly what you describe, it gives me a better state of the art. – Pindatjuh Jul 6 '11 at 18:17
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There is actually a language, QCL which is designed to be run on simulated quantum machines. It's based around C style syntax and is compilable with GCC and has added functions to cope with the qubits.

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  1. http://dwavesys.com/en/products-services.html

  2. Umm, you'd want to know the answer to this before you even considered buying one :P

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I think question 2 is the really interesting one. And such a language could be run on a simulator. Of course there's a huge distortion in memory and time cost, but you can already try to get your head around what I would assume to be a set of fundamentally different programming concepts. – back2dos Oct 21 '11 at 12:05
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Quantum Computing as a hobby is a very nice idea. I think that to buy and even build a Quantum Computer is unpractical.

But you can have quantum computing as a hobby and read books about it. In youtube you can find some nice videos about Quantum Computing too.

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