Basic examples#

Here are a few short basic how to examples.

How to write and execute a circuit?#

Here is an example of a circuit with 2 qubits:

import numpy as np
from qibo import Circuit, gates

# Construct the circuit
c = Circuit(2)
# Add some gates
c.add(gates.H(0))
c.add(gates.H(1))
# Define an initial state (optional - default initial state is |00>)
initial_state = np.ones(4) / 2.0
# Execute the circuit and obtain the final state
result = c(initial_state) # c.execute(initial_state) also works
print(result.state())
# should print `tf.Tensor([1, 0, 0, 0])`
print(result.state())
# should print `np.array([1, 0, 0, 0])`

If you are planning to freeze the circuit and just query for different initial states then you can use the Circuit.compile() method which will improve evaluation performance, e.g.:

import numpy as np
# switch backend to "tensorflow"
import qibo
qibo.set_backend("tensorflow")
from qibo import Circuit, gates

c = Circuit(2)
c.add(gates.X(0))
c.add(gates.X(1))
c.add(gates.CU1(0, 1, 0.1234))
c.compile()

for i in range(100):
    init_state = np.ones(4) / 2.0 + i
    c(init_state)

Note that compiling is only supported when the native tensorflow backend is used. This backend is much slower than qibojit which uses custom operators to apply gates.

How to print a circuit summary?#

It is possible to print a summary of the circuit using circuit.summary(). This will print basic information about the circuit, including its depth, the total number of qubits and all gates in order of the number of times they appear. The QASM name is used as identifier of gates. For example

from qibo import Circuit, gates

c = Circuit(3)
c.add(gates.H(0))
c.add(gates.H(1))
c.add(gates.CNOT(0, 2))
c.add(gates.CNOT(1, 2))
c.add(gates.H(2))
c.add(gates.TOFFOLI(0, 1, 2))
print(c.summary())
# Prints
'''
Circuit depth = 5
Total number of gates = 6
Number of qubits = 3
Most common gates:
h: 3
cx: 2
ccx: 1
'''

The circuit property circuit.gate_types (or circuit.gate_names) will return a collections.Counter that contains the gate types (or names) and the corresponding numbers of appearance. The method circuit.gates_of_type() can be used to access gate objects of specific type or name. For example for the circuit of the previous example:

common_gates = c.gate_names.most_common()
# returns the list [("h", 3), ("cx", 2), ("ccx", 1)]

most_common_gate = common_gates[0][0]
# returns "h"

all_h_gates = c.gates_of_type(gates.H)
# returns the list [(0, ref to H(0)), (1, ref to H(1)), (4, ref to H(2))]

A circuit may contain multi-controlled or other gates that are not supported by OpenQASM. The circuit.decompose(*free) method decomposes such gates to others that are supported by OpenQASM. For this decomposition to work the user has to specify which qubits can be used as free/work. For more information on this decomposition we refer to the related publication on arXiv:9503016. Currently only the decomposition of multi-controlled X gates is implemented.

How to perform measurements?#

In order to obtain measurement results from a circuit one has to add measurement gates (qibo.abstractions.gates.M) and provide a number of shots (nshots) when executing the circuit. In this case the returned qibo.abstractions.states.AbstractState will contain all the information about the measured samples. For example

from qibo import Circuit, gates

c = Circuit(2)
c.add(gates.X(0))
# Add a measurement register on both qubits
c.add(gates.M(0, 1))
# Execute the circuit with the default initial state |00>.
result = c(nshots=100)

Measurements are now accessible using the samples and frequencies methods on the result object. In particular

  • result.samples(binary=True) will return the array [[1, 0], [1, 0], ..., [1, 0]] with shape (100, 2),

  • result.samples(binary=False) will return the array [2, 2, ..., 2],

  • result.frequencies(binary=True) will return collections.Counter({"10": 100}),

  • result.frequencies(binary=False) will return collections.Counter({2: 100}).

In addition to the functionality described above, it is possible to collect measurement results grouped according to registers. The registers are defined during the addition of measurement gates in the circuit. For example

from qibo import Circuit, gates

c = Circuit(5)
c.add(gates.X(0))
c.add(gates.X(4))
c.add(gates.M(0, 1, register_name="A"))
c.add(gates.M(3, 4, register_name="B"))
result = c(nshots=100)

creates a circuit with five qubits that has two registers: A consisting of qubits 0 and 1 and B consisting of qubits 3 and 4. Here qubit 2 remains unmeasured. Measured results can now be accessed as

  • result.samples(binary=False, registers=True) will return a dictionary with the measured sample tensors for each register: {"A": [2, 2, ...], "B": [1, 1, ...]},

  • result.frequencies(binary=True, registers=True) will return a dictionary with the frequencies for each register: {"A": collections.Counter({"10": 100}), "B": collections.Counter({"01": 100})}.

Setting registers=False (default option) will ignore the registers and return the results similarly to the previous example. For example result.frequencies(binary=True) will return collections.Counter({"1001": 100}).

It is possible to define registers of multiple qubits by either passing the qubit ids seperately, such as gates.M(0, 1, 2, 4), or using the * operator: gates.M(*[0, 1, 2, 4]). The * operator is useful if qubit ids are saved in an iterable. For example gates.M(*range(5)) is equivalent to gates.M(0, 1, 2, 3, 4).

Unmeasured qubits are ignored by the measurement objects. Also, the order that qubits appear in the results is defined by the order the user added the measurements and not the qubit ids.

The final state vector is still accessible via qibo.measurements.CircuitResult.state(). Note that the state vector accessed this way corresponds to the state as if no measurements occurred, that is the state is not collapsed during the measurement. This is because measurement gates are only used to sample bitstrings and do not have any effect on the state vector. There are two reasons for this choice. First, when more than one measurement shots are used the final collapsed state is not uniquely defined as it would be different for each measurement result. Second the user may wish to re-sample the final state vector in order to obtain more measurement shots without having to re-execute the full simulation. For applications that require the state vector to be collapsed during measurements we refer to the How to collapse state during measurements?

The measured shots are obtained using pseudo-random number generators of the underlying backend (numpy or Tensorflow). If the user has installed a custom backend (eg. qibojit) and asks for frequencies with more than 100000 shots, a custom Metropolis algorithm will be used to obtain the corresponding samples, for increase performance. The user can change the threshold for which this algorithm is used using the qibo.set_metropolis_threshold() method, for example:

import qibo

print(qibo.get_metropolis_threshold()) # prints 100000
qibo.set_metropolis_threshold(int(1e8))
print(qibo.get_metropolis_threshold()) # prints 10^8

If the Metropolis algorithm is not used and the user asks for frequencies with a high number of shots then the corresponding samples are generated in batches. The batch size can be controlled using the qibo.get_batch_size() and qibo.set_batch_size() functions similarly to the above example. The default batch size is 2^18.

How to write a Quantum Fourier Transform?#

A simple Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) example to test your installation:

from qibo.models import QFT

# Create a QFT circuit with 15 qubits
circuit = QFT(15)

# Simulate final state wavefunction default initial state is |00>
final_state = circuit()

Please note that the QFT() function is simply a shorthand for the circuit construction. For number of qubits higher than 30, the QFT can be distributed to multiple GPUs using QFT(31, accelerators). Further details are presented in the section How to select hardware devices?.

How to modify the simulation precision?#

By default the simulation is performed in double precision (complex128). We provide the qibo.set_precision function to modify the default behaviour. Note that qibo.set_precision must be called before allocating circuits:

import qibo
qibo.set_precision("single") # enables complex64
# or
qibo.set_precision("double") # re-enables complex128

# ... continue with circuit creation and execution

How to visualize a circuit?#

It is possible to print a schematic diagram of the circuit using circuit.draw(). This will print an unicode text based representation of the circuit, including gates, and qubits lines. For example

from qibo.models import QFT

c = QFT(5)
print(c.draw())
# Prints
'''
q0: ─H─U1─U1─U1─U1───────────────────────────x───
q1: ───o──|──|──|──H─U1─U1─U1────────────────|─x─
q2: ──────o──|──|────o──|──|──H─U1─U1────────|─|─
q3: ─────────o──|───────o──|────o──|──H─U1───|─x─
q4: ────────────o──────────o───────o────o──H─x───
'''