Qiskit
More info
- Owner
- IBM
- Released
- Type
- Quantum programming framework
- License
- Apache 2.0
- Source
- github.com/Qiskit
IBM's Python framework for quantum programming, and the one more people have tried than any other — largely thanks to free access to real hardware.
You build a circuit by placing gates on a register, run it on a simulator or on one of IBM's machines over the cloud, and get back a distribution over measurement outcomes. Because quantum programs are probabilistic, you run the same circuit thousands of times and look at the statistics.
The heaviest lifting is done by the transpiler. It rewrites the circuit into the gates the machine actually has, and shuffles qubits around so that two-qubit operations only happen between neighbours on the chip. A circuit can swell considerably at that step, which is a common surprise the first time you run against real hardware.