!dev (?)

Why does my teacher think it's reasonable to give an assignment for writing a scientific article about quantum computing in the first semester of CS? Like really? I just got out of fucking high school you bitch, all math I know is basic linear algebra. Thankfully I'm a nerd that likes computers so I got the basis of classical computing covered, I can only imagine how my classmates that never touched a computer are holding up.

It's not that I don't like the subject, in fact I'm loving it and thinking of specializing in quantum computing one day, but don't you think this is a bit much for a first semester assignment?

Probably to scare everyone off the course who thinks it's going to be about writing println statements, using Excel macros, or just people that think they know it all already.

Interesting enough, one of the most basic mathematical concepts you need to understand to get into quantum computing is linear algebra :D you have the advantage!

@AleCx04 yeah, at least that, but I don't understand 80% of this math because I don't have all the other knowledge required. Dirac's notation, what the hell is a Hilbert space, stuff like that. Little by little I'm learning (and actually understanding \o/) what these are. Then there are quantum mechanics concepts like superposition, entanglement, etc. I get the very basic concept of those but it's hard to find resources explaining it in a way that makes sense and says more than "superposition means a qubit can be 0 and 1 at the same time" without requiring all this math and physics knowledge. Plus learing it all in a month is a bit tight....

TBF, it's not quantum physics. Oh wait... At least it's not rocket science.

@PublicByte yeah... My teacher is crazy, everyone says that. But I think she gave us this assignment to see how well we know how to research and write an article (it's a scientific writing class), so maybe she won't be expecting too much from us.

Anyways, I think I figured out how to do this. So far I understand pretty decently how qubits work so I think I'll write my article about qubits. That's all. Idk anything about quantum error correction, how the fuck these algorithms work and the math behind all quantum gates. I know the basics of qubits, so I'll write about that, make a decent article about one thing is better then a half-assed one about a dozen things.

Depends on the level of detail required.

getting a very loose general idea of the possibilities of quantum computing is not that insane.

Even non-programmers can get the gist of just how hufe the jump quantum computing would be, plus some of the challenges invovled, after reading 15 minutes of wikipedia.

I think it’s a solid idea to make students read a bit about it just to know SOMETHING about it.

(Even if it’s not practically viable at the moment. As a comparison: it was good to know how ray-tracing would work even long before it was practically usable in games)