Wednesday 31 July 2019

Quantum Computing and Me

Why Quantum?

If you are one of my colleagues or close (technology) friends you'll know that I've been researching quantum computing for a while now. It all started back at Devoxx Vienna in March 2018 when I saw a great talk by Alasdair Collinson (who I've since become good friends with) entitled "The Quantum Computers are Coming". At the time of seeing Alasdair's talk my knowledge of quantum computers was close to zero. I had vague recollections of reading something about quantum key exchange in a book about codes and cyphers years ago, but I've since learnt that isn't really to do with quantum computers anyway. I was lost pretty early in the talk and I wanted to ask him some questions and also give feedback. I thought he should try and give a little more basic material at the start to try and help people along.



Alasdair's was the last talk of the day and if you watch the video, you'll hear Alasdair mention "[releasing the audience] to the beer" at the end. Immediately after that talk was the free beer party. I didn't manage to talk to him during the party but I knew the speakers were being taken for dinner that evening so I thought I would talk to him later.

Unfortunately by the time we got to the speakers' dinner either I was a little tipsy, or Alasdair was, or more likely we both were and we didn't manage to have too useful a conversation. I remember thinking to myself "how hard can it be?" I'll do some research and learn the subject myself and maybe I can do a job of making a more accessible version of this quantum computing talk malarky.

When the conference was finishing up I had a chat with one of the organisers. He told me that he was involved with a couple of conferences in Krakow and asked if I had submitted to them. I hadn't and so he asked me if I wouldn't mind submitting. The CFPs were both closing a day or two later so he urged me to submit as soon as possible. When I got home that evening I decided to submit the same talk that had got me into the Vienna conference and, on the spur of the moment, I knocked up a synopsis of a talk about quantum computers and submitted that as well. I fully expected that the Polish conferences would pick my well known talk on Microservices if they picked up anything. As it turned out, I was wrong. And a few weeks later, having not done much about learning the subject, I suddenly had around 6 weeks to prepare a talk for Devoxx Poland on a subject I knew barely anything about. The result of my learning can be viewed here.

Learning Quantum and Duncan Mortimer

A few weeks after Vienna I was lucky enough to roll off my project and have a couple of weeks on the beach. This was my opportunity to learn about quantum things. I was chatting to somebody in the kitchen in our office and one of my colleagues, Duncan Mortimer, overhearing the conversation divulged that he was interested in quantum computers. It turned out that he was an enthusiast, had studied the field at university fairly recently (he's a lot younger than me) and we agreed to pair on a talk at the ThoughtWorks Away Day. This chance encounter made all the difference as Duncan was able to help me understand enough to cobble together a coherent story for Poland with, crucially, a very basic demonstration of quantum code using Q#. If you watch that first effort of mine at talking quantum you'll see that I used Duncan as a humorous element to essentially excuse my lack of understanding at certain points in the presentation.


A ThoughtWorks Quantum Strategy

At the Away Day I chatted with the ThoughtWorks global head of technology and in the brief chat we had he mentioned that nobody in the UK (or anywhere as far as he knew) was taking the reins of quantum and moving it forward. We need a global strategy on quantum he told me. Would I like to take that on? I told him I had no idea what this means so we agreed to have a chat afterwards. I therefore took on the responsibility of trying to make ThoughtWorks "Quantum Ready". My pitch to anybody that I could engage on the subject is that at some point in the next 5 to 10 years, quantum computers will be a commercial reality in some form. When that happens we (ThoughtWorks) need to be in a position to take advantage of the new opportunities this will create.

Meetups and Conferences

Obviously I needed to know more about the subject. I had managed to go to just one talk in London about quantum computing before the first conference in Krakow. It was a great talk at Microsoft by Dr Julie Love about the Majorana Topological Qubit. They believe that this is the technology that will lead to a stable, less error prone, qubit than can currently be realised by other techniques (of which there are many) and will therefore ultimately give Microsoft an advantage. This was the first time I had gone to a meetup (other than those held at the ThoughtWorks offices) for many years and I realised a while later that the ThoughtWorks culture coupled with this new exciting field had finally combined to reawaken my interest and love for technology that had bene stifled and crushed by the toxic culture and terrible working conditions at my previous job.



Throughout the remainder of 2018 I went to many meetups organised by the London Quantum Meetup group and got to know the organisers of that group. Every time I learnt new things I was able to remove some of the cruft about my learning journey and maybe correct some of the stuff in my original presentation that I had wrong or modify the way I could talk to parts of it to reflect my increasing knowledge. Thus my presentation became a living record of how my learning moved along and I have preserved it as it was when I presented it at various points to various conferences (something I do with all my decks).

Quantum Hackathon

I started going regularly to meetups organised by the London Quantum Computing group. If you live or work in London and you are even vaguely interested in quantum computing I thoroughly recommend you go to some of these meetups, they are great. One of the organisers happened to tell me that they were trying to organise a quantum hackathon. The idea would be that we get a group of people together to work on an organic chemistry problem (a solved problem I might add, quantum computers aren't yet powerful enough to tackle the stuff that classical computers can't solve). Two companies from Cambridge, Dividiti and Riverlane provided some open source software support and IBM were on hand to give us priority access to their IBM-Q computer. The event was a great success.


Manchester Workshop

After the success of the quantum hack day I was asked by our Manchester office if I could organise something similar in Manchester. Unfortunately this wouldn't be possible because I didn't really organise the London thing, I just (through ThoughtWorks) provided the venue and the food. I did suggest that I could give a presentation and perhaps an evening workshop on how to program quantum computers. This was enthusiastically agreed to and I fixed a date with the Manchester community coordinator.

So one lunchtime, we got together in the Manchester office kitchen and I gave a long version of my conference talk (much evolved from the original) which was very well received. The audience was mainly ThoughtWorkers with a few outsiders (it was advertised as a public event) thrown in. 

The evening was a lot more nerve-wracking. The event space was full (I was told 60 people) and this was mainly external visitors. Even though we had advertised the event as "bring your own computer and play along with the presenter" nobody seemed to have read that, or at least nobody seemed to have followed that path or installed the software (Microsoft quantum developer kit) as we had asked them to. So the result was an hour of me talking people through how to use IBM-Q, a five minute break and then an hour and a half of me explaining Q# and showing demonstrations.

Shor's Algorithm

When I gave a talk at a conference in Poland in September it bombed badly. Amongst the torrent of dire feedback were some really useful comments that I determined to act upon in future. One such comment was that the demonstrations I gave were trivial and didn't really demonstrate anything that a quantum computer could do that a classical computer couldn't. This was fair and I resolved to address it.

So in the week leading up to my trip to Ukraine I found myself implementing Shor's Algorithm from first principles. The Q# samples provided by Microsoft actually has a version of Shor but I couldn't really understand it properly and, further, I felt that it was a sub-optimal implementation because the quantum computer was doing all of the work whereas it should only be used to do step 4 (the quantum period finding routine). In my mind, as well as demonstrating the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), implementing Shor is a great way to showcase how you should selectively pass control between your classical computer and your quantum computer, only using the (very expensive) quantum compute power for the parts of the algorithm that can't be done on a classical computer.

On the day of the talk I had a wonderfully written, test driven, example of the whole of Shor's algorithm but using a C# algorithm to find the period. All that remained was for me to write the quantum period finding routine and plug it in. Sadly, this was much easier said than done. In the end, I had to compromise and I effectively "lift and shifted" that part of the Microsoft implementation into my own code, which included an implementation of the "Fast QFT" that I didn't fully understand. You can look at my implementation (which has barely changed since I originally made it) on my Github.  

I ran it successfully in the speakers' room about an hour before my talk and sat back in satisfaction. Then I ran it again and it failed. And again. And again. And each time the failure took ages and appeared to involve some kind of .NET kernel memory overflow. Not good. When I was close to despair, it decided to work again so I took a screenshot of the results in case, as seemed likely, it failed in the subsequent talk.

Here is the slide that made it into my deck:

Andrew Bryer

In early 2019 I found myself working in the ThoughtWorks Manchester office a couple of days a week. One of the Manchester people who had reached out to me to see if I would run something quantum based in Manchester had been Andrew. When I started working in Manchester he was on the beach looking for something to do. I got talking to him and asked if he fancied doing some research in Q# and helping me out in understanding how better to implement the QFT. He was only too pleased to help out. So I lent him a book I have, Minds, Machines and the Multiverse, instructed him to read the chapter about the QFT and help me to implement it in Q# without using any library functions. It didn't take him long.

Then, I asked Andrew to look on my Github and see what I had done in my implementation of Shor and just to concentrate on implementing the quantum piece. The first thing he did, after about half an hour if memory serves me correctly, was to tell me that he had found the issue that was causing my implementation to crash and had fixed it. He then proceeded to implement the quantum period finding routine from first principals using his own QFT implementation. I thought that would take him a while, but once we'd established how Q# can be used to link any action to a control qubit (a great feature but I have no idea how it would be supported in a real quantum computer) it didn't take him long. When I was on the train home to London from Manchester that evening, I got a message from him.

So there are a couple of morals to this story. Firstly, ThoughtWorks grads are brilliant. If you have a pure software problem to solve, even if it is in a paradigm that they had never heard of until a few hours previously, they are brilliant at solving it. Secondly, quantum computers are a long way off being actually, practically useful!

Using Many Worlds...

After doing all the research up until the back end of last year and trying to understand the "real" quantum algorithms (such as Deutsch-Josza, Shor and Grover) I realised that I couldn't reason out why they were so powerful without understanding things in more depth. I started to read more books about the fundamentals of quantum physics because so many of those "basic" concepts need to be understood to grok what is going on inside of a quantum computer. This helped me to understand up to a point and certainly helped me to understand the quantum state, which is usually expressed as state vectors, often using bra and ket notation (which I'd never come across before). This work was also, for me,  an excellent refresher course in some of my long forgotten university mathematics.

But something was still missing. I remember in the early days often hearing phrases such as "the qubit is in superposition" or "...holding both the value 0 and 1" and I think I had used similar phrases myself whilst internally holding a picture of the Bloch Sphere and imagining a thing with a state entirely represented by the quantum state arrow on that Bloch Sphere. There are at least a couple of problems with holding that view in your mind.

  • Firstly, as alluded to in my previous sentence, the Bloch Sphere is really only valid to help to understand a single qubit. 
  • Secondly, we need to be able to convey that the probability of returning a 1 or a 0 is not the full picture; we need to be able to convey that any computation that the quantum algorithm will carry out will use ALL of the possible values of ALL of the qubits that take part in the computation. 
  • Thirdly qubits interact with one another and generate interference patterns which can be analysed and exploited.

Many Worlds Interpretation

One of my breakthroughs in understanding came while I was reading (I think) The Fabric of Reality possibly at the same time as reading Introducing Quantum Theory, a Graphic Guide. I had heard and read in one of his different books, that David Deutsch was a believer in the Many Worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics. In fact it could be said, if I understood correctly, that he believes that the very fact that an algorithm such as Shor works, proves that the MWI is correct. I like his assertion that whilst the Copenhagen Interpretation correctly predicts the observations associated with quantum mechanics, it doesn't explain them. On the other hand, MWI predicts observations and explains them.

Young's Double Slit Experiment

Many people will remember carrying out a version of the double slit experiment at school. This was first demonstrated by Thomas Young in the early 1800s. He devised it as a way of "proving" that light is propagated by waves and not, as Newton had suggested and was the prevailing theory of the time, by particles, which Netwon had called "corpuscles". Thus, by showing that light can be made to create an interference pattern, he showed that light must travel as a wave.

But, in the early part of the 20th century, physicists were questioning again whether this view was correct. Indeed, much of the early work in the new quantum mechanics of physics indicated that light was, in fact, propagated by particles, called photons. This led to the creation of the concept of "wave particle duality". The explanation was that as light travelled the photons would interfere with one another so that explains why the interference pattern and the particulate nature or light are not inconsistent.

So far, so consistent. But then, in 1909, Geoffrey Ingram Taylor performed the experiment with low intensity light so that photons were mostly emitted and absorbed singly such that their flight paths from emission from the light source to detection by the detector did not overlap. Subsequent experiments have guaranteed that only one photon is in transit at one time. The remarkable result of these experiments was that if you allow them to run for a time so that each photon incident on the detector has its position recorded, then the interference pattern builds up over time. So interference is still happening, even though there is no other thing in flight to interfere with. The inference drawn, if you believe in MWI, is that the photon, although apparently the only photon there, is interfering with the "ghost photons" that are taking the other possible paths in all the other universes. So far this is the best explanation of what is going on in Young's double slit experiment (single photon version). The Copenhagen interpretation has no explanation for the interference patterns in the single photon version.

Making Videos

In the interests of making my talks more interesting, I revamped the "is Quantum a thing" title into "Using Many Worlds to Solve the Unsolvable". At the same time I made a video with some ThoughtWorks colleagues in which we reproduced the double slit experiment using some crude materials and a laser pointer. That video was debuted in my talk at Codemotion Amsterdam in April 2019 (but I can't find a link to that) and I used it again in Minsk in May 2019.

Adding a live video seemed to go down really well and by summer 2019 I had done a couple of lightning talks that just included the section on Shor's algorithm with a suitable level of abstraction and simplification around the QFT. They were really popular. So much so that I persuaded Devoxx Poland to give me a 40 minute slot to expand the idea and to do a bit of work around the post quantum cryptographic landscape. For that talk I wanted to do another video, this time using my daughters to help me at home. We used polarised light filters to demonstrate how light photons are polarised and thus to lead in to a talk of BB84 quantum key distribution. This longer talk has so far only aired at Devoxx Poland and to private audiences.

Right up to Date

In July 2019, I left ThoughtWorks which was very sad (as I've noted in several places). One of my sadnesses whilst still at ThoughtWorks was that I found it very difficult to get any kind of management interested in quantum computing because it just isn't commercially interesting yet, apparently. When I came to Codurance, a much smaller and more nimble consultancy, the response I got was very different. The small commercial possibilities that did not interest my previous employer are very interesting here. So hopefully I will get the support to continue my passion for learning new things in the quantum space (and giving talks about it) as well as, hope against hope, maybe we'll manage to find some real work to do in this arena before too long. No doubt I will write about it if it ever happens!

2 comments:

  1. Steve Halsey here. Tried to send u email. Please reply for chat. Ta Steve

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    1. Hi Steve. I moved on from ThoughtWorks, drop me a mail to james.birnie@codurance.com

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