This new Google experiment lets you program a quantum computer

Quantum computing has been promising a lot for a couple of years now. For the average person though, it’s all a little bit difficult to get to grips with.

It’s pretty promising therefore that Google’s latest Chrome experiment seems to be taking a step, however small, to changing that. Called the Quantum Computing Playground (QCP), the experiment allows anyone with a little bit of programming know how to control a virtual quantum computer.

As the QCP homepage notes, there are a lot of differences between traditional and quantum computers, starting with they process information:

A classic computer processes bits, which at any given time can be in one of two states: 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in any superposition of states 0 and 1, and are represented by a complex number. When N qubits are in superposition, a combination of 2^N states is created. A classic computer can only hold one of these states at a time, while quantum computers can perform meaningful operations on superpositions of states.

If you understood that, congratulations, you’ll probably feel a lot more at home on QCP than most.

If you want to be really sure you belong on the site though, have a look at how programming works on quantum computers:

The most basic operations performed on qubits are defined by quantum gates, similar to logical gates used in classic computers. Using quantum gates one can build complex algorithms, usually ending in a measurement operation, which obtains a classical value of qubits (either 0 or 1, but not a superposition). The state of a quantum computer, a set of qubits called quantum register, can be visualized in a number of ways, typically as a 2D or 3D graph, on which points or bars represent superpositions of qubits, while their color or bar height represent amplitude and phase of a given superposition. An interesting property of quantum gates is their reversibility, allowing for program execution both forward and in reverse without any side-effects.

As Readwrite notes QCP is pretty much a playground designed to let engineers play around with basic quantum computing concepts.

Given how early in the lifecycle of the technology we are though, that’s pretty much all it can be. As its creators note though, “the proof-of-concepts for capabilities of quantum computing have been demonstrated in multiple laboratories around the world, so there is a chance that quantum computers will become one day everyday’s reality”.