IBM announced on March 29 that it will begin the first developer certification for quantum computer programming.

Quantum computers are still in their infancy, but many industry experts say that now is the time to learn the basic concepts. In terms of the hardware of quantum computers, there are few things that can be understood immediately and intuitively, but most of the software tools that are actually used are those developed by people who are currently active in the industry, and almost all of them. It should feel familiar to the developers of.

The official name “IBM Quantum Developer Certification” naturally focuses on IBM’s own software tools, especially the SDK (software development kit) for quantum computers, “Qiskit”. There is. Qiskit has already been installed more than 600,000 times and has proven to be extremely popular. In 2020, when the IBM Quantum and Qiskit team held a quantum summer school, about 5,000 developers were said to have participated.

However, developers need to not only know the basics of Qiskit (definition and execution of quantum circuits, etc.), but also the basics of quantum computing itself. Understanding Bloch spheres, Pauli matrices, Bell states, etc. will make you well prepared to take the certification exams to be held on the Pearson VUE platform.

Abe Asfaw, IBM’s global leader in Quantum Education and Open Science, revealed that this is only the first step in a series of planned quantum developer certifications. It was.

“We’re building a multi-tiered developer certification,” he told me. “This announcement is the first step in guiding developers how to handle quantum circuits. How to build a quantum circuit using Qiskit and how to run it on a quantum computer. And how do you see and interpret the results after running them on a quantum computer? That will be the stage of the upcoming series of certifications we are developing, and these certifications. Is given to use cases being considered in areas such as optimization, chemistry, and finance. If a person can be shown to be able to work with quantum circuits, all of these tasks can be integrated into the developer’s workflow. It will be possible”.

quantum cert

Which statement creates a quantum circuit consisting of four qubits and four classical bits? (Image credit: IBM)

IBM has long been focused on educating developers about quantum computing, as it can take some time to develop the skills and intuition to build quantum circuits, Asfar emphasized. did. The open source Qiskit SDK also provides developers with circuit-level (close to writing in C and assemblies in the classical computing world) and application-level (many things are abstracted here). Asfer also mentioned that many of the tools needed to work in both) are integrated.

“This is to make it easier for people currently developing in the cloud or Python to incorporate quantum computing into their workflows by running these tools,” Asfar said. “Honestly, I think the hardest thing is to give you the peace of mind that quantum computing is a reality today and you can work with quantum computers. That’s the Jupyter Notebook. It’s as easy as opening and writing code in Python. ”

Asfar noted that IBM is already helping developers (partners) who are interested in quantum computing improve their skills. But so far it has only been a very ad hoc process. The new certification program will allow developers to formally prove their skills and show that they are in a position to leverage quantum computing in their workflows.

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