FinQ Tech's Successful Contribution to Unitary Hack 2023
We are delighted to share our journey as a sponsor of a team at the Unitary Hack 2023, a fantastic global event that encourages people to make contributions to the open source quantum ecosystem. The hackathon ran from May 26 to June 13, and our team made a significant contribution by adding a Variational Quantum Time Evolution Tutorial to the IBM Qiskit platform.
The Challenge
The challenge was to create a tutorial for the qiskit.algorithms package, specifically demonstrating how to use the new time_evolvers.variational package. The tutorial needed to introduce variational quantum imaginary and real-time evolution based on McLachlan's variational principle. It also had to show how to leverage these principles using Qiskit classes, and to benchmark the default gradient/qgt methods with the new classically efficient gradients introduced in the qiskit.algorithms.gradients.reverse_gradient package.
Our Contribution
We are proud to say that our team, composed of I-Chi (@ichen17), Kaixin (@huckstar), and Wenxiang (@wenxh0718), rose to the challenge and delivered an excellent tutorial that not only met the requirements but also provided great value to the community. The team's Pull Request, titled "Add a Variational Quantum Time Evolution Tutorial (fixes #1391)" (#1470), was accepted and merged.
In our tutorial, we have introduced the variational quantum imaginary and real-time evolution based on McLachlan's variational principle. We have demonstrated how this can be leveraged using Qiskit classes and have also benchmarked the default gradient/qgt methods with the new classically efficient gradients introduced in the qiskit.algorithms.gradients.reverse_gradient package.
The Outcome
The outcome has been extremely positive. Our contribution was accepted, and it is now part of the IBM Qiskit tutorials. You can check out the tutorial here.
As a company, FinQ Tech is committed to supporting quantum computing research and development. We believe events like Unitary Hack are instrumental in fostering innovation and collaboration in the quantum computing community. We are proud of our team and their contribution to the open source quantum ecosystem.
Stay tuned for more exciting updates from FinQ Tech!