Because evolution is unitary.
Project Inspiration
Looking for inspiration? This section contains links that might inspire new Unitary Fund projects.Unitary Fund is supporting the development of QuTiP, the Quantum Toolbox in Python. Interested students can apply to propose a code project in QuTiP and be mentored by the core developers for a 3-month period, working remotely, similarly to the Google Summer of Code. A list of project ideas is available from the QuTiP wiki. Applications are open all-year-round.
Cassandra Granade - a UF Advisory Board member and senior developer on Microsoft's open source Quantum Development Kit - has some suggestions:
- Additional Q# simulators (e.g.: open systems or CHP simulators)
- New language interoperability; currently, can call into Q# from Python, C#, F#, VB.NET, or PowerShell
- Visualization and/or debugger tools (e.g.: improving the state visualizer sample)
- New libraries for quantum algorithms (e.g.: we’ve gotten requests for QRAM implementations and a Durr–Hoyer library)
Travis Scholten - an Advisory Board member from IBM Quantum - suggests:
- Some of the larger issues in Qiskit Terra labelled as "short projects."
- Implementing the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm for approximating a given unitary by gates from a finite set, to arbitrary accuracy.
- Writing a simulator for parameterized quantum circuits, leveraging the Qiskit Parameter object.
- Building an encoder and decoder for quantum expander codes. (References here, here, and here.)
Michał Stęchły - an Advisory Board member from Zapata Computing - shares his ideas:
- Visualization tools for high-dimension optimization landscapes could help get better insight into algorithms like QAOA or VQE. Orqviz is our attempt to tackle this issue, but contributions / other attempts would be welcome.
- At QOSF we have done evaluation of open source projects in quantum in 2018. Help with updating and automating the process would be appreciated.
- Many QC-related projects are scientifically solid, but lack on the software engineering side – murky architecture, lack of tests, versioning, CICD, etc. I believe improving the quality of the software could greatly benefit the community.