OQaml

OQaml is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Introduction

OQaml is a reference implementation of the Quantum Abstract Machine (QAM) outlined in R. Smith, M. J. Curtis and W. J. Zeng, "A Practical Quantum Instruction Set Architecture," (2016), arXiv:1608.03355 [quant-ph]. The purpose of OQaml is to demonstrate the conceptual similarities between a classical state machine and a Quantum state machine. It highlights the facts in which functional programming lends itself ideally to the operations on a quantum state as it enforces deliberate actions to force side-effects, i.e. interactions with the environment.

OQaml currently supports ProtoQuil (a subset of the full Quil instruction language) which includes one- and two-qubit gate instructions as well as a full state measurement.

Getting started

Setting up the environment

To hit the ground running to interact with OQaml you need to set up your OCaml environment as described in a short OQaml setup guide. The best way to interact with OQaml is the use of utop. A more general guide how to set up a good OCaml environment can be found in the RealWorldOCaml instructions.

OQaml actively uses Owl and JaneStreet's Core_extended. Both of which can be easily install using Opam. Note, however, that some functionality of OQaml requires the latest changes to the development branch of Owl, which is not yet available on Opam.

Installing OQaml

If you have already have a working OCaml environment you can install OQaml by cloning this repository and run.

make oasis
make install

from the repository root. This will install OQaml into your OCaml environment.

Interacting with the Ocaml QVM

If all functionality is installed then interactions with the OQaml QVM are best done using utop running

utop

This drops you into a OCaml REPL and you can start loading modules and interact with the QVM.

utop[0]> #require "oqaml";;
utop[1]> #require "owl";;
utop[2]> module V = Owl.Dense.Vector.C;;
module V = Owl.Dense.Vector.C
utop[3]> module Q = Oqaml;;
module Q = Oqaml
utop[4]> let tqvm = Q.init_qvm 3;;
val tqvm : Q.qvm = {Q.num_qubits = 3; wf =
        C0
R0 (1, 0i)
R1 (0, 0i)
R2 (0, 0i)
R3 (0, 0i)
R4 (0, 0i)
R5 (0, 0i)
R6 (0, 0i)
R7 (0, 0i)

;
reg = [|0; 0; 0;|]}
utop[5]> let prog = Q.CIRCUIT([Q.Y 2; Q.CNOT (0,1); Q.X 0]);;
val prog : Q.gate = Q.CIRCUIT [Q.Y 2; Q.CNOT (0, 1); Q.X 0]
utop[6]> Q.apply prog tqvm;;
- : Q.qvm = {Q.num_qubits = 3; wf =
        C0
R0 (0, 0i)
R1 (0, 0i)
R2 (0, 0i)
R3 (0, 0i)
R4 (0, 0i)
R5 (0, 0i)
R6 (0, 0i)
R7 (0, 1i)

;
reg = [|0; 0; 0;|]}

Note that the gates in the set prog are executed from right to left in the way quantum-mechanical notation acts on a state.

Walkthrough

More details can be found in the small getting started walkthrough.

Building the docs

To build the API docs you can run

make oasis
make docs

This will create a subfolder containing an HTML project that exposes all public APIs of OQaml. To create the readme files and images you need the most recent development version of readme2tex; Compilation is done with

make readmes

will convert the tex markdown files to well readable markdown.

Development and Testing

The test infrastructure uses Alcotest. To run the tests you can execute

opam install alcotest
make oasis-test

How to cite OQaml

If you use the reference-qvm please cite the repository as follows:

bibTex:

@misc{oqaml2017.0.0.1,
  author = {Rigetti Computing},
  title = {OQaml},
  year = {2017},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/rigetticomputing},
  commit = {the commit you used}
}

and the paper outlining the mathematical specification of the quantum-abstract-machine:

bibTeX:

@misc{1608.03355,
  title={A Practical Quantum Instruction Set Architecture},
  author={Smith, Robert S and Curtis, Michael J and Zeng, William J},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.03355},
  year={2016}
}