Great, yeah, let's get going. Thanks, everyone, for coming to the Devroom, very exciting
to see so many people around. Just want to give a shout out to the Devroom organizer, my
myself and Nate from the Unitary Foundation, sort of like Linux Foundation, maybe more
modest than that, but for quantum computing, Unitary because if you know a bit of
linear algebra, yeah, Unitary matrices are important in quantum computing and that's
all the linear algebra I'm going to use here. That's the email if you have a feedback
for the organizer and Devroom manager. So a bit of history on the quantum computing Devroom,
there were two addition, I think only two addition in the past, if I'm correct, 2019 and 2020,
it was organized by the quantum open source foundation, it's another foundation,
quantum computing specifically by Thomas Babay and Mark Fingerhood. And since then,
there has been a four-year, had this bit for, you know, COVID and also I guess people have been
very busy building quantum computers. They didn't have time to organize the Devroom, but I can
guarantee there was lots of progress in the last four years. Yeah, and this is a bit of an
inception, so this was a talk by Thomas, the organizer, this was the welcome in 2020,
and he was resharing a tweet of me from 2019 showing how many people there was, so as popular as this
one. Yeah, unfortunately, we missed the last four years, but we are back. I give a quick
intro just to set the seniors, so I'll talk in one slides about quantum computing for people who
come from like classical Devroom. I'll talk about why you need software for quantum computing,
specifically why you need open source software for quantum computing, and why open source
software for quantum computing is here at first them today. So quantum computing in one slide,
this basically a paradigm that uses some property of quantum mechanics. They are called with these
three names, you don't need to know all the details, but some of you are from quantum, so they already
know superposition and tangleman. And interference, thanks to this awesome property of quantum
mechanics, you can basically improve the speed and the security of computers for certain tasks.
So there are many caveats in the last sentence, when I say improve the speed and security of computers,
there are many caveats, but hopefully in the talks of today we will understand some of them.
It's been an area of research for maybe more than 20 years, and we are approaching the
the time where we are trying to make this like feasible, we are actually trying to build quantum
computer and hopefully proper application and feasibility will come in the 20 years in the next
20 years. I know that's one of the frequently asked questions when are we going to have application
when to computer, so that's my answer at least. Right now, we are in this era of noisy
intermediate scale quantum computer, which means we are around implementation that have up to
1000 qubits. The application, since I know you were going to ask our like,
you know, there is lots of hype on many, many application. I'm not even going to repeat those,
but the actual application are cryptography, so you can actually compute the secret key from
the public key of RSA scheme, so you can break some protocols for classical cryptography.
Probably what's the most important is that you can simulate quantum systems, and this will allow
you to design new materials, design new drugs, and apparently something that people really care about,
design more efficient fertilizers. Lastly, there are some optimization problem that you can also
speed up with quantum computer that are like things like routing and scheduling.
But about software, so let's go through the job or the workflow, quantum scientists of
a quantum engineer, so you come up with an algorithm or a protocol in this new paradigm,
and you write it in a paper in like a research paper in a formal language. Usually,
something like looks like this, so you can see these as something like a Boolean circuit, but more
complicated than that, and then you actually want to run it on hardware, on quantum device.
So there are many steps here, well first of all, when writing in a formal language means that
you need to define the formal language, then you need to have something that compiles it,
you want to test it first for at a small scale on like classical device, because you can do that,
you can simulate it, and then you want to run it on hardware device. So that's what a quantum
scientist or engineer would do. So I need some tools for this job, which are first of all,
coming up with algorithm, usually some algorithm that we use in this noise intermediated
are like hybrid algorithms, so you need some classical programming as well, things like error mitigation,
BQA, which you don't need to know the specific, but basically you run a bit of quantum
algorithm, a bit of classical algorithm, it and then you iterate on that, and I also say you
need to write in a formal language, so what people are doing this day is defining some domain
specific languages, this is probably what you are going to do for things like kiskit,
silk, all these big companies, but also like I think we will see some of these languages defined,
and you do have to define compilers, because of step 3, you need to define simulator,
and these are all like things that you can write with classical software, like you can write
these things in Python, then you need to control the hardware, so only the cylinder there that
you see is the quantum stuff, all the rest is like firmware that you need to control will like
classical toolkit, so how about open source then, well we are in a, it's a very interesting
field for open source and a bit different from like other things that you see in other
bedroom, because we are still in a R&D phase, so I personally believe open source is even more
important here, because we don't know yet what the correct approach is, on top of that there are
different approaches, that different research group, different companies are taking, so you do want to
verify the claims they make, and you know if you have more transparency, if you have like open
benchmark, this is going to be easier, finally we are here writing a full stack of a computer from
like the hardware, like laser or things I don't understand, because I'm right, now the physicist
but then you need to write like firmware on top of that, you need to write the compiler,
you need to write like error correction, things that we wrote like 30, 40 years ago in like classical
computing, and yeah we have the chance to redefine the whole stack, so we may also do it in open source
way, incidentally like a week ago or so, Boba and Melco came up with this paper where they describe
the economics of open source quantum computer, which is very interesting, the landscape is crazy,
is there are like 400 project right now, only open source dedicated to quantum not only computation
but device cryptography all these things, as a unitary foundation we do run a survey with
every year with 800 participants, where we ask question about quantum open source, and yeah you can
check it out at that link, and finally at first them, so this is the schedule of the day,
some very interesting talk and yeah looking forward to them, and that was about it, yeah thank you.
So I guess throughout the schedule there are like five minutes gap, we are going to take
some of the questions at the end of the talk, and then maybe we'll run over a bit in this five
minutes, but also use the five minutes to like leave the room if you decide that you don't really
care about quantum computing, and let other people come in. So yeah if you have any question for me
in time, both as an organizer and specifically to the thing I thought about very quickly.
If you have an open source software, there is a build on top of what's sorry,
proprietary hardware, I guess I don't know if it's question for me or for someone from the
maybe some other open source policy debroom, but I don't know, I think that you know if it's on
GitHub and it's public, and it defines one of the layers I was talking about, I would consider it
open source, yes. Yes. Yeah that's a good question. So what the question is what will happen
with our bank accounts, credit cards, that all rely on RSA cryptography? So I guess the answer is
too full, there is like post quantum cryptography in like classical computing, so you can define
protocol that are more complex than RSA. We don't yet know how well they perform, because you know
RSA has been tested for like 30 years, and there are not like theoretical proofs, it's mostly
based on the fact that we don't know how to solve this problem, like if you know RSA works,
it's basically relies on this one-way function, and we don't know how to reverse them, so that's why
we use them, but we also know that we tried to crack them for 30 years and we didn't succeed,
so we can write protocols that are robust against quantum computing, that's one answer.
The other answer, magically I said, magically quantum mechanics offers a way to do like
cryptography, that some kind of cryptographic protocol that you can not do on like classical,
with classical protocols, so maybe you can use that. And yeah, I think the times it's up,
we will start in like one minute, and with the next talk.