Quantum Computing Experimentation with Amazon Braket

Helping IT Teams Deliver Critical Capability

Quantum computers might need a vacuum to isolate fragile qubits from the noisy environment, but this book on Quantum Computing Experimentation with Amazon Braket was hardly created in isolation or in a vacuum.

With over 25 years managing IT professionals, delivering unique solutions to clients and strategizing between business and technology stakeholders, I have gained some experience in how to accelerate adoption of a technology, how to communicate complicated concepts and how to find the most efficient way to upgrade my team's skills from one technology to the next. Quantum Computing is new to a lot of us, but in the world of IT with automation, SOA, RPA, IOT, Digital, Predictive Analytics, AI/ML, Agile, Cloud, Virtual Assistants, AR/VR and so on, every year there is a new technology pulling on the technical teams limited time and budget for consideration. Every technology comes with its opportunities, risks and implementation realities. My key reason for writing this book was to provide the professionals in the process of determining the viability and adoption of a new technology an efficient route to getting hands-on exposure. After that they can take the next steps towards their own use cases, or digging deeper into the mathematics and theory towards a strategic advantage. Many have already started this journey, but I hope this book, along with Amazon Braket, will allow for an acceleration in this movement through the Global 5000 companies.

Classical To Quantum

My own journey in quantum computing, starting with signing up with the D-Wave Leap program in 2018 and then taking the MIT|xPro courses in 2019 has been a series of lucky connections with like minded individuals leading to us rolling up our sleeves and trying to figure out how we can solve a specific real-world problem or optimization using a quantum computer. Back then you needed to have separate accounts and access to quantum devices through individual SDK and tokens. In November 2020, I was able to access the IonQ Ion Trap for the first time through Amazon Braket. Already I had interacted with, worked with or learned from so many people in quantum computing.

Moving from the rules based mechanistic thinking to now thinking in terms of optimization, quantum advantage, higher dimensions, quadratic relationships, density matrices and so on was a challenging, and at times painfully slow transition. However, this industry is full of dedicated teachers and companies heavily vested in building a broad quantum ecosystem. I went to many meetups, conferences and hackathons and loved the energy and inspiration from talented individuals that had worked in this field for years. I also worked with many just entering the field and doing exceptionally well. In one example, one of my high-school students at Harrisburg University built a quantum simulator while I was teaching the concepts, and in another example, an intern who wrote a generic Shor's algorithm in a few days after reading through a specific paper and ran it on the Amazon Braket simulator. I hope this books inspires more students like that.

It was April of last year that Packt Publishing reached out to me to write this book. Initially I was quite ambitious in the scope of the book and highly unrealistic in the time it would take to write. But, having signed the contract I set forth to create a unique book that would bring to the Packt reader my lessons learned and insights gathered through my own journey, developing solutions, collaborating on projects and through teaching others. In order for the book to be unique, I created a pedagogy for a step-by-step learning process for someone new to quantum computing that would touch upon the key concepts in linear algebra, graph theory, combinatorial optimization and quantum computing that led directly towards solving real-world optimization use cases. I had to rein in the scope to just optimization and two methods for real world use cases, but I hope it makes for a clearer and more solid foundation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Packt team, who guided me through the writing of this book, who were very open and flexible in my ideas and suggestions to make this book a unique value to the market, and who invested many resources in ensuring my words were clear and the concepts were carefully introduced and explained. I am also grateful for the more than one year sustained effort by the Technical Reviewers Rakshit Jain and Gopal M. through one chapter after another.

I would also like to thank the Amazon Braket team since without their vision for an integrated platform where one can access multiple devices, I would not have been able to access IonQ hardware and Rigetti in a convenient pay-per-use model. Without the support of Michael Brett and the Amazon Braket team in providing credits to experiment on projects and resource availability to answer questions, none of this would have been practical.

Finally, I would like to thank Matthew Versaggi who wrote a very generous foreword to the book which I would highly recommend as the first place one should start with the book.

So with much appreciation and thanks to those who have in one way or another helped me or influenced me in the writing of this book, I welcome others into this journey and an ecosystem where vacuums are at the hardware level, but everywhere else you will find support, collaboration and eagerness to help and learn.

The Book

The print book will come in a stylish and elegant cover with angled shading on a matte finish. The book is 422 pages with a mix of explanations, diagrams, code and results of execution on quantum hardware. 200+ images with 116 images in color. The reader can scan through all the experiments and results and then dive into the code details and make modifications for their own purpose. All code is available including creating a Bloch sphere. It covers IonQ , Rigetti Computing and D-Wave quantum devices and their features as available through Amazon Braket.

The Early Reviews

I would like to thank the wonderful friends who provided early reviews for the the book. They are from different areas in quantum computing and so their voices dissect the book from different perspectives, however, as one voice their opinion is now included in the book.

“Informative, interesting, understandable, practical, comprehensive, thorough, effective – just excellent!” - Terrill Frantz , Professor at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, USA

"Alex has done wonders by blending storytelling techniques with a crisp and clear explanation of technical aspects of a complex Quantum technology. Every element of technological advances service providers achieved inside Amazon Braket is well chronicled. On top of that, every code is written in an optimized and self-explanatory manner. Managerial aspects of using the Quantum Computers to solve real-life problems are also discussed, which will help users properly evaluate the tool. Overall, this book is a fantastic treasure trove to get you started on Amazon Braket in particular and Quantum Computing in general.” -? Anshul Saxena, PhD , Christ University - India.

"Quantum Computer Experimentation with Amazon Bracket is an essential resource for businesses and developers preparing for how quantum computers will impact their respective industries. Alex provides practical examples of familiar optimization problems accompanied by easy-to-understand coding guides for multiple available systems on Amazon Bracket. Comforting hints, links to additional resources, and pre-execution cost estimation methods bring necessary clarity in what is a new frontier for many readers.” - Michael Heiner , Information Systems Professional

?“An easily digestible guide for quantum based cloud computing. Khan leverages Amazon Braket to take complex topics and simplify them for those interested in quantum computing. Readers familiar with AWS will recognize parallels between existing cloud services, while those familiar with quantum will be exposed to cloud fundamentals through a guided journey.” - Zia K. Mohammad , Senior Product Manager

“Alex Khan’s book?provides a detailed step-by-step insight into Amazon’s quantum computing environment.??The book is very insightful to both novices and experienced quantum computing software developers with an examination into all the options available in Amazon Braket. Well done, Alex!” - John Cummings , Quantum Computing Engineer

“Well done! I thought the book was very well laid out and contained thoughtful code and explanations of solving optimization problems using Bracket.?Overall, I think this book will be very helpful to a wide variety of people, especially those AWS users who want to experiment with QC.?Congratulations!” - Salvatore C. , Quantum Computing Technical Manager

Packt Publishing Team

Group Product Manager: Pavan Ramchandani , Publishing Product Manager: Kushal Dave , Senior Editor: Keagan Carneiro , Content Development Editor: Adrija Mitra, Technical Editor: Saurabh Kadave, Copy Editor: Safis Editing, Project Coordinator: Sonam Pandey, Proofreader: Safis Editing, Indexer: Tejal Daruwale Soni, Production Designer: Jyoti Chauhan, Marketing Coordinator: Sonakshi Bubbar

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- Alex Khan