Dancing with Qubits: From qubits to algorithms, embark on the quantum computing journey shaping our future , Second Edition

I love reading about the latest innovations in quantum technology and the 2nd edition of “Dancing with Qubits” (Packt, 2024) by Robert Sutor is a return to one’s roots. The book explores the underlying theory, conversion into quantum logical and physical applications and then explores some future topics. Filled with exercises and step-by-step examples, this book makes quantum basics reachable to everyone, if not always understandable. If you take the time, and work through the steps, this can be a key reference and a solid foundation for revisiting your quantum fundamentals.Instead of diverting math to appendices, Sutor puts all the needed steps up front. If you slept through high school and college math, this collects all those lessons in 200 pages. Learn all the algebra, geometry, and elements needed to plan out those quantum circuits. If you missed circuit design, those binary basics are also included in the first section.The second part brings in the quantum in a big way. Beginning with one qubit transformation, the following chapter examines multi-qubit sequences for the logical gates. This allows maximizing quantum properties for superposition and entanglement when conducting calculations. If you have not looked at these in some time, I would remind you the basic Grover algorithm conducts the need for search elements from having to examine N-1 to only n when determining components. So in a 1000-element set, classical computers must look at 999 factors while a quantum computer only needs to examine 32 elements. This oracle function then expands with other algorithms requiring only 1 look to verify set elements.The second section continues with establishing circuit designs and examining the physical properties of quantum computers. Most quantum algorithms are logical, but converting them to computing requires a physical expression. These physical expressions appear in photons, and Sutor again brings us up to speed on the needed elements. The best part of the section was the exhaustive list of the requirements to benchmark one’s quantum devices, and the ability to test with classical simulations. This ensures purchasing not just a quantum capability, but the best capability for your problem set.The final section explores future topics beginning with Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) to machine learning, and then some exploratory questions. The NISQ section fully describes how these non-error corrected and not fault tolerant computers can still satisfy many of one’s quantum needs. The ML elements discuss the basic model to convert a dataset into quantum notation, and then suggests some neural network opportunities for expansion. Finally, the last chapter, another must-read, suggests the questions one should ask about capabilities within the quantum industry from basic hardware profiles to who to hire.The strength and weakness of the book was its heavy math component. You probably don't need this book if you are up to speed on your matrix math and tensor calculations. However, if you slept through those classes, the math presented can be intimidating, summarizing multiple years in eight hours of reading. I fall somewhere in between, at times, the presented equations were helpful and at others, tedious. Since every element builds on the previous knowledge, the temptation to skip ahead can be strong, but leaves you behind in the following sections. Sutor tries hard to build a step by step approach but the book’s sheer volume proves a challenge.While I did not read the first edition, “Dancing with Qubits” does an excellent job from the basics to the advanced. I am not sure that I was dancing at the end of it but I certainly feel more comfortable with my knowledge. The approach in starting with fundamental classic math, expanding into quantum logical circuits, and then converting to quantum physical computers was excellent. I strongly recommend reviewing the book if you are in the quantum field, and it makes an excellent reference to bring others up to speed quickly.Dr. Mark Peters is a Senior Director of Solutions Architecture (Raft), responsible for integrating theoretical and physical options into tailored customer deliveries. He served 22 years as a US Air Force Intelligence officer on everything from fighters and drones to satellites. He holds multiple certifications as a cybersecurity expert (CISSP), a Ph.D. in Information Technology (Capella), and a Strategic Security Doctorate (Henley-Putnam). He authored "Cashing in on Cyberpower" analyzing a decade of cyber-attacks and has forthcoming books on "Confident DevOps (Kogan Page, Jul-2024) and Platform Engineering (Packt, Sep-2024). A frequent reviewer for industry-leading books, he has written 100+ reviews and articles.

Dancing with Qubits: From qubits to algorithms, embark on the quantum computing journey shaping our future, Second Edition. This title is fitting because the book explores the fundamentals of quantum computing, focusing on qubits and their manipulation through quantum algorithms, which can be seen as a complex dance of quantum information.The book delves into various aspects of quantum computing, including:Fundamental Concepts: It explains the basics of quantum bits (qubits), their properties like superposition and entanglement, and how they differ from classical bits.Quantum Gates and Circuits: It covers the operations (gates) that can be applied to qubits to manipulate their states and how these gates are combined to form quantum circuits.Algorithms: It introduces key quantum algorithms, including Grover's search and Shor's factoring algorithms, and explains how they offer potential speedups over classical algorithms for specific problem types.While the book is technical, it aims to make quantum computing accessible to a broader audience, including those without an extensive background in physics.

Dancing with qubits is an introductory textbook on the subject of Quantum Computing. The book is meant to introduce the subject itself, some of its applications, and provide a general framework from which to learn more about the subject. For starters, the name may be off-putting to some, as it sounds more like a pop-science kind of title than a serious study, but this is far from accurate. The book provides a pretty comprehensive view of the basics of quantum computing, and presents a very good springboard for future learning.In short: The book starts with a short discussion of quantum computing and why you should study it, followed by several chapters on the math required to understand it, a couple more on basic quantum circuits, and a final few chapters on more advanced topics. The book is very accessible to an inexperienced audience, and is very thorough about covering any potential questions one might have about the math. It is remarkably well organized, with every chapter having its own short introduction that covers everything in it, and summaries at the end. The book takes its time to develop each topic satisfactorily, and is cautious to never present too much new content at once, which makes it an ideal introduction to the topic. The second edition added two chapters on more advanced topics, which are welcome as a primer to further study. Also praiseworthy is the consistent inclusion of references to material for further study on almost every topic, which gives a great pointer for anyone interested. The book doesn’t cover a lot of quantum information theory, which sets it apart from other books in the subject, but this absence isn’t a serious detriment. The exercises are generally interesting and worth it.Chapter 1: The first chapter deals with why someone would want to study quantum computing, and does a good job of building excitement for the topics in the future. The following 5 chapters are nearly all math, so getting a taste of quantum really helps with keeping attention.Chapter 2: The second chapter of the book deals with classical computing and boolean logic, which is a topic many authors take for granted in QC textbooks. I find the inclusion to be very useful as reference for newcomers, and it presents enough depth to be worth a read if you haven’t covered the topics recently.Chapter 3: The third chapter deals with constructing complex numbers from the naturals. This discussion may be trivial to some, and anyone with a serious background in mathematics can probably skip it, but it is definitely worth having as a reference for useful concepts later in the book.Chapter 4: The fourth chapter covers a geometric treatment of numbers. This may still be a little basic for those who have previously studied math at the undergraduate level, but like the third chapter, the discussion is worth it as a reference.Chapter 5: This chapter covers vector spaces, and is probably the first I’d strongly recommend not skipping unless you are very familiar with the topic already. The discussions of vector operations are interesting and it does an admirable job of presenting many disparate topics from linear algebra in such a compact and intuitive way.Chapter 6: This is a short chapter that discusses probability. It is useful as reference, but those with a mathematical background will be fine skipping it entirely (although it is only 19 pages so you might as well read it). The length is not a criticism though, the discussion is sufficient for the topics covered in the book.Chapter 7: This chapter begins the discussion on actual quantum computing with a single qubit, and it is pretty thorough. I would have liked to see some more examples of how the gates are used, but otherwise the chapter covers everything I’d have liked to see.Chapter 8: This chapter builds on the previous one by discussing multi-qubit gates. The jump is smooth, and it covers pretty much everything necessary at this stage.Chapter 9: This chapter starts covering actual circuits, and touches on most of them. This part is what I usually find to be the most jarring leap in complexity in QC, and the book handles it very competently. I particularly like the discussion of oracle functions, which I often find insufficient in texts.Chapter 10: This chapter goes through some more advanced (and useful) quantum circuits like the quantum fourier transform and phase estimation, all building to presenting Shor’s algorithm. Shor’s algorithm is a natural choice for this, and it is handled well, although this is one of the more challenging chapters in the book.Chapter 11: The final chapter in this section covers some of the limitations of quantum computing and how these are being tackled. This was probably my favorite chapter in the book, as it covers a lot of interesting topics in good depth and presents a lot of material for further study. I particularly liked the discussion on building a quantum simulator.Chapter 12: Beginning with the advanced topics, the book covers Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum algorithms (NISQ), going through applications in optimization, simulation, among others. The chapter is somewhat light on actual circuits and examples given the complexity of the topic, but provides a very good starting point for developers who want to begin using QC for real applications.Chapter 13: The final content chapter in the book goes through quantum machine learning, which is arguably the most eye-catching topic that is being studied nowadays. The inclusion is very welcome, and it is a nice overview of where the field is currently headed.Chapter 14: This chapter serves as a conclusion to the book, and presents questions on whether QC can be useful for the reader depending on their area of focus. The questions are pretty insightful, and it helps stem the tide of overhyping that has been growing in the field.Overall, this is one of the best textbooks for an introduction to the world of quantum computing, and is one I’ll surely recommend to beginners on the topic.

Robert Sutor’s book “Dancing with Qubits” is critical for anyone wanting to learn about quantum computing with a solid mathematical understanding. Therefore, whether you are in high school, in a non-STEM field, or like me, who had not dealt with any complex math for 20 years, this book was critical to familiarizing myself on the key mathematical concepts and which I later also used when I wrote my own book on quantum computing.“Dancing with Qubits” Second Edition is divided into three sections.Section IThis section covers the basic math that someone should have gone through in college (even high school) that supports the key concepts needed for quantum computing. This includes numbers, circles, dimensions, and probability. Probably a good refresher for many of us in business and jumping into quantum computing for different reasons.Section IIThis section starts with qubits and digs deeper into Dirac notation, the Bloch sphere, matrices, tensor products, quantum gates and then into algorithms. The chapters include detailed explanations, visualizations, and mathematical representation of the frequently used quantum gates. It includes step by step derivation of the math for various popular quantum algorithms. By the time you reach Shor's algorithm and modular exponentiation you would have fully explored qubit states through Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), phase estimation and order finding.One chapter that I did not fully get into during my first reading of the book is Chapter 11. Getting Physical. It includes some important concepts for error correction, Shor code, benchmarking, and simulations. It also gets into some physical implementation of qubits such as photonics.Section IIIThe last section, which is new to this second edition, covers variational algorithms that make up the foundation for solving optimization and machine learning problems on quantum computers. For those who already have the first edition, this would be the motivation for ordering an additional copy, apart from other minor edits throughout the previous sections.Bob starts the discussion by reminding the user of single and multiple variable functions along with classical method for optimization to find their minimum and maximum. The book goes over Max-Cut which is frequently used in quantum computing as a baseline problem, and discusses Hermitian matrices, the variational principle, parameterized circuits, time evolution and the Hamiltonian. This then leads to an explanation of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). As I have tried to teach my students, understanding QAOA is a great place to start before getting into Quantum Machine Learning (QML). Bob does the same.The book then proceeds to the topic of QML. Bob spends some time explaining how to encode real world data into amplitudes or angles, before touching upon quantum neural network circuits and how their parameters might be optimized. Bob discusses support vector machines and quantum kernels as a use case for this area which is being heavily researched. Keep in mind that section III is more of an introduction to this vast topic of QML rather than a full treatment.SummaryOverall, the book does a superb job of simplifying complex topics by taking the reader through bite sized steps to allow understanding and familiarity with how quantum computing and algorithms really work. The strength of the book is to ensure you have the best mathematical foundation as you progress on your quantum journey. There are some connections to material covered in Bob's other book "Dancing with Python". I would highly recommend the book to anyone getting into quantum computing with the desire to understand how it works mathematically. The cover is in color, but the inside the figures are all b/w.

This text teaches important math in the context of truly understanding the fundamentals of quantum computing. Each math lesson in this book is very useful on its own, but the author does wonders to gear the discussion towards quantum systems. It is fun to read even for those math averse. There would be a lot of value for the future of QIP if students were provided these connections at an early age, and this text might very well some day contribute to quantum supremacy through its readers. I found this text to have a lot of value, and I am already excited for the third edition.