Learn Quantum Computing!

Key Takeaways

Alrighty. Hello. Hello everyone tuning in. Fingers crossed. I hope we are live. Great to see. Hey, some folks already hanging out with us in chat. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Should be over on YouTube. Should be over on LinkedIn. Should be on Twitter X. Should be on Twitch having some fun. And hey, diving into another just hacking training live stream. Uh, look, it's a big day today, if I may say. I have been running around trying to get prepped and ready for uh a lot of extracurricular. You know, a little bit of uh the Nom Con capture the flag. We'll chat a little bit about that super duper soon and all the other CTF shenanigans up in the air. Um, but look, if you know the spiel, you probably maybe clicked in because hey, we want to dive into a little bit of quantum computing and quantum programming and Ellie. Ellie is the star of the show. She's been here with us before and we'll dive into that in just a little bit. But if you know the spiel, it's usually like a five or 10 minute monologue from me to just share the announcements to lay out some info to make sure folks are up to speed on everything that we're up to hanging out over in the just hacking training uh venture direction that arm. The other fun thing that we've been chasing, another spinning plate and everything to help get some more education, awareness, cyber security, learning, training, focus, technical training for all levels out and about. So, uh, with that, forgive me. Let me do the thing. Let me go ahead and screen share. And actually, hey, before I go away and go tiny, you might have seen it. We have shirts now. We have shirts. We have stickers. All this cool stuff. Uh we were out and about for a lot of different conferences and travel just recently and it felt really good to be able to hand out some swag and to hey let other folks kind of see what we're all about and some other sweet representative all of our allstar kind of cadre cohort all-star instructors that were help spreading the word. So super cool stuff. Anyway, I've been rambling for two minutes already and let's dive in. Hey, I do want to go ahead and showcase once I share my screen after I move and uh organize different windows. I will get this up and running. That's the fun of doing it live. Let me go ahead and screen share and pull up JHT. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Is audio okay? Is mic chopping? I see some sentiments in the chat, but check it out. justacking.com is where everything that we've been offering now recently in a lot of different courses and a lot of different paths and training education upskill challenges that are free that are hey accessible easy z price tag hackalongs at capture the flags and before we dive in in case the top question at the top of your mind is hey this is this live stream going to be recorded because if you can't catch it right now in the moment yes the answer is yes the answer is always yes and if you were to take a look over the top of the just hacking.com navigation. The events page here clues us in as to everything that we are up to, whether it's all online with live streams that we have upcoming, past events, past recordings, past sessions together with them, and then what we're up to in the real world. Uh, and appreciate you all hanging out with us in May now, the third week of May. So, there's new content and things out the door. But, uh, it's been a lot this month. It's been a lot of travel. I was just a way over for Hack Space Con and Besides Tampa over in Florida. And big thank you so much for the folks that were able to hang out, say hi, shake hands, chat a little bit. And if you tuned in to my keynote for Besides Tampa, thank you so much. I think that was wellreceived. Uh seemingly was a positive reception. Look, a couple other cool things cooking up uh next on the docket for us. If you are attending the Central Ohio Infosex Summit, if you're there, I think yesterday and today, please be sure to come say hi. We will be hanging out with the IoT or internet of things village and you can participate in the MQTT lab that we have kind of a hands-on interactive exercise and activity to do some of those internet of things security stuff. And up coming up next, we will be sponsoring Thoughtcon and Bides 312 out of Chicago. So if you're in that area again, please come say hello. It would be phenomenal to see you. With that, let's get to the old page. the rest of the stuff that we can chat about with all the latest releases because it is the third week of the month and we've got new content coming out the door. Look, we have said for the longest time that when we're putting together just hacking training, we want the majority of this thing to be free, to be name your price, to be pay what you want to be, pay what you can. And the best charge onward in that direction is are the upskill challenges. And these are free. They're simple. They're, if I may say, bite-size, short and simple, and easy. Only about 10 to 30 minutes of student time to be able to cruise through it. and they're all about some really cool unique stuff. Um, previously we had a lot of things with the quantum computing and the quantum programming that we'll dive into soon with Ellie, but for this month there's a lot that we wanted to be able to help showcase. We put out I think three I think now maybe four upskill challenges for this round of material and you can go get them. You can dive in just hacking.com. Now I think we are up to 50 different offerings things that we can bring to the table with just hacking training and all the material and that's pretty cool to have 50 unique different upskill challenges hackalongs courses and paths etc. and almost 20 20 of them I I think 20 is the number for upskill challenges and we can keep that going for uh the rest of the name your price pay what you can stuff but in case you missed it I sorry I didn't give it as much love as I should have the threat hunting reports is the latest upskill challenge from Jen Jennifer Funk who's been doing some incredible CTI stuff and she is a badass uh doing phenomenal great things we need to get a shirt sent over for them and one of the coolest things is we do have uh ladies cuts for the shirts. I think that is very very necessary and I'm glad we got to squeeze it in. Other than that is Sysmon. Hey, this is another opportunity for a lot of the endpoint detection capabilities, endpoint telemetry, inside information on a Windows host. This is all put together by Antonsky. So if you've played with our constructing defense course, his giant, incredible and phenomenal huge lab environment to be able to have a full active directory domain, Kubernetes cloud shenanigans, uh Anton is a wizard. So big shout out to him and Sysmon is the latest on deck with that. And another super cool one that I am so excited about is satellite security. I know it's not all just oh ones and zeros. Oh, hacks thrown up like cross- sight scripting and SQL injection and stuff. No, we thought we might add a little bit of satellite security in there. This is off the heels of hack spacecon and we wanted to join forces really giving some love to Hannah Hannah Schmidz also known as word uh over there with the CTube team and did want to give them some love because they has been great to work with and uh phenomenal to be able to put out a satellite security training and material. It's so cool. Cyber security in space and and again this is hey for your learning. So a little bit of education and things to be able to read up and get smart on and then a quiz to be able to assess yourself. That's the format for upskill challenges. Uh but if you wanted to get into anything a little bit more and more and more hands-on, you've got the hackalongs, you've got the capture the flags. And the next on that is the latest release on the CTF world is we are opening the vault for uh the cyber jutsu con capture the flag we hosted in 2023. We're also doing a bundle in the spirit of Nomon CTF 2025 kickstarting today right after this live stream and I'm running around for that. You can get everything that we do have out about right now. Um, for the Huntress CTF, for the past Nom Con, for the previous sneak, and now Cyberjutsu Con, all for 50% off, and you can get all of those. Um, but with that, Nomon CTF is all online at ctf.nomcon.com. Please, please, please go do play. I know that's not strictly in the JHT direction, but it is another thing that I'm running around for. So, I would really love if you want to tune in and play. We have so many cool challenges for you that I'm genuinely excited about because I I'm hoping to see the reception. But with that, quantum computing is another direction that I did want us to dive into. And that is another upskill challenge that Ellie has put together. And Ellie is the special guest today. So, we want to make sure we can give her the warm welcome and introduction as needed. But before I do, let me double check that I have read through all of the things that I'm supposed to say. my notes, my announcements, and the spiel. Yeah. A couple quick cool other things, and we'll go way way back for this. Um, Ellie's course, Easeme into Cryptography, does have a 20% off active thing at the moment. So, if you want to get a little bit sharper on the low-level numbers and math and equations and crypto behind the scenes, that is an option for you. And while we have had a lot of upskill challenges and uh capture the flags released for this week as the third week of May, as we dive into June, the next time we get together for another live stream, we will be hanging out with Corey Corey Macy. Some folks might be familiar with her work. Uh she's I think Corgi on a lot of social media. She has been doing phenomenal stuff with the social engineering village. I know she's heavily involved in um Defcon, excuse me, and and along with Besides Nashville just as well. So, incredible community member and she is putting together a course on fishing and a technical extremely on the keyboard, really hands-on, working with all the tools and understanding the lingo to do legitimate fishing and social engineering entry points and access. The subtitle for the course is fishing um a technical course for hackers. So I think that'll be awesome and I think that'll be really cool and I'm looking forward to her expertise coming to the table. But that's enough me rambling. Ellie is the star of the show today and I think I clocked in at just like 10 minutes. I think I got that all I think I got that all on time. I hope. Well, with that I can open the door for Ellie if that's a okay. Hey, my friend's backstage. Can you hear me? Okay, sounding good so far. Ready to come on? Cool. I love the queue. I appreciate it. I will bring Ellie in. We'll have some fun. Hey there, Ellie. How are you? Hello. I'm good. How are you? Excellent. Audio is all good. Can you hear me? Okay. Chat Noly know. Is audio good? Normalization levels and volume? Everybody can hear everybody hopefully. Well, Ellie, I'm stoked to see you. I was, you know, thinking reminiscing back on all the travel that we've been doing running around and we were at RSA and we finally got a chance to catch up with each other. Great to finally meet you in person and say hello on the show. You've been all over the place just as well, right? Yeah, we've both been running around, but it's all been good things. Yeah, it's been a busy a busy start to the year, but I've I had a really good time at RSA. I love conferences for getting to say hey to people in person. So, well, I know we spent some time together on a live stream before, but would you mind filling in the gaps or just kind of color in the picture for folks that I don't know, maybe are now tuning in for the first time and don't know you and don't know what you're up to and all the things that you're about. Can you, I don't know, do your spiel, your introduction? Yeah, my my elevator pitch. Yes. So, for anyone I haven't met yet, I'm Ellie. I'm a software engineer by training. I started my career kind of deep in the weeds doing C programming working on crypto libraries which is how I wound up kind of in the cryptography and cyber security space. Um but ventured through the tech world in a bunch of different roles wound up in ventureback startups and just loved it. Um, lately I've been working with a lot of early stage non-technical founders to help them get things built up. Uh, like a trusted MVP, if you will, something that's kind of secure and and good to go from the start so they don't have to rebuild. And that kind of led into a brand new project that is just launching called Yala, which is automated um, and live software architecture documentation. And so it's kind of that same, you know, we we sort of like went through this process in the cyber security world where we're like, wait, we can't see any of these logs. We should see them. And that's kind of where software architecture is right now. Like we just don't it's hard to see, you know? So that was what I was after with with Yala. Can I showcase Yala for a second or at least bring it up? Is that okay with you? Yeah, go ahead. I just I I you sent along the website and I think it's pretty cool. Uh I love the idea. Is there more behind the scenes or more that you've kind of got up your sleeve here? What else can you tell us? So, it basically Yala can connect to a codebase and do architecture reviews on PRs. It will autogenerate a bunch of basically structured data and then you can look at it in any way that you want, right? So, you can look at architecture diagrams at the really high level. Maybe if you're talking to a nontechnical stakeholder, you can zoom all the way down into like functional modules. Maybe you're an engineer trying to get more context about the system. So, I think there are a lot of really cool features that that could come as we continue to build this out, but it's really just bringing more visibility in an easy to understand way for for software systems. Super cool. Well, I didn't mean to put you on the spot. I hope that wasn't me just throwing a curveball at you, but I did want to make sure Hey, we could give you some love. I think that's awesome. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. We're having a good time. Well, I don't know if that's the current project or more things that you're up to. Uh, it's funny. We've been trying to chase and keep track of what would have been I don't know if it was the month. I don't know if it was the international month or the international year, but a big celebration for quantum computing, quantum programming, all quantum things. Am I barking up the right tree? Do you remember? Do you kind of is am I saying that right? Yeah. what it was called like the international quantum celebration or something. Yeah, I know. And we had reconnected about it. Um yeah, I quantum is a really interesting space to me. I kind of bounced into it maybe I don't know via a side channel like I was in the cryptography world and then a lot of cryptographers this must have been maybe 10 years ago or so were starting to think about okay if if this quantum computer thing can break crypto we need to we need to start thinking about that in the in the crypto space. Um and that I was like what is quantum what's that? So I started learning more about it and it's really fascinating. So, I'm I'm glad that I was able to kind of dive in and hopefully we can share with the audience a little bit too. And I'll be the first to admit uh I am very naive. I am very ignorant on that front. It is all above my head. So, please, please, please uh help clue me in. I might be the 5-year-old like asking the explain like I'm five questions. So, hold my hand for a little bit of learning if that's okay. Um but what are the all of our heads? Yeah. I mean I I know you've been getting smart on it and super smart on it. So what what is if I may say the the real or tactical like landscape right now and are a lot of the speculation or a lot of the concerns or a lot of the I don't know if paranoia is the right word but when everyone thinks of quantum they jump to their own conclusions of it'll break cryptography it'll break computers the whole world is going to go different directions. Is that true? Is that a yes for real? So, okay, it's a good question. So, we know all of the math. Like, we have all of the algorithms and papers proving that like, okay, we know that Shor's algorithm will break the thing that modern asymmetric cryptography relies on, right? Quantum computers though right now in the wild are not even really close to being big enough and stable enough to do this for real. So we know that it will get there and we can assume just like has happened for all of history that the tech will get better and more stable. Um and we want to be prepared, right? Because a lot of our sensitive information like we rely on asymmetric crypto to protect a lot of things. Um, but we're still kind of I would say it's still maybe in the researchy phase. Like there aren't a lot of use cases happening live in the real world like in production with quantum computers just yet. That's comforting, I guess, or like good to hear. I mean, it it at least reassures me. Um, because yeah, I maybe I just had my head in the sand. Maybe maybe I've been not paying attention as well as I should have, but I like I could never tell which of these is the the real reality. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally know what you mean. And it's it's it's hard too because the implications sound so scary and so you're like, "Oh my god, are we ready for this?" Um, but I think from my perspective, the tech is really cool. There are a lot of really smart researchers working on, you know, getting bigger, more stable quantum computers. Uh but we've also had researchers working on quantum resistant cryptography like we've had people thinking about okay how do we you know how do we get ahead of this right like once we have these computers I can do all these crazy things what does that actually mean so I there are ways that we are prepared so I have I I feel you know a good deal of warmth about that anyway and I know you put together quantum computing in one direction and another quantum programming are those vastly different in I don't know how we even just kind of mentally represent them or is is it you know what structures the basics and the theory and then what's practical hands-on and getting a chance to play with it. How do you define those? Yeah, that's exactly how those two upskill challenges are split up. The first one quantum computing is more just like what is a cubit? How can I think about this? Why is it different from a classical computer? Um, and then the second one, quantum programming, is kind of like, okay, now let's zoom in a little bit, right? We know the difference between quantum and classical. Okay, we know how to write programs for classical computers. How might we do that? Like, how do we even interact with these different types of of bits? That's what the the second one is, the programming one. Super cool. What do you think? What's the best way for us to be able to hey in the moment get a crash course? Uh is there anything that you'd be willing to showcase? And okay, I I I remember I think we were thinking about it quite right. The international year of quantum science and technology, the IYQ. Big shout out. Uh big love to that effort. But yeah, what do you think? Is a demo already in the in the works for you? Yeah. You want me to share? If that's if that's good, let's do it. Awesome. Okay. And I saw we had a question come in too. Oh, good call. Just asking about like postquantum cryptography and whether the future is AI or quantum. Um, so this is a good question. So postquantum cryptography is usually referring to quantum resistant cryptography. So cryptography remember is all this math and it relies on certain mathematical problems. One of those problems is not easily solved by classical computers, which is why asymmetric cryptography works on on classical computers. But there's an algorithm called Shor's algorithm that quantum computers can run that does solve this mathematical problem. So when we're talking about quantum resistant or postquantum cryptography, this is referring to math that is hard for both classical and quantum computers. So it's just like okay let's come up with some new algorithms test them implement them and then roll them out. Um so that's part one and then asking about kind of the future of AI and quantum this is an interesting question too. I've been dabbling a a bit in the AI space. Um, I'm I guess I'm not really sure. Like I think these are two kind of different categories of things and maybe they're both maybe they like rhyme in the way that they help, right? Because quantum computers will give us tools that are good at things that classical computers are not good at and AI is like kind of doing that in a way too, right? AI is a little bit like creative and non-deterministic, which is not really how normal programs work. So, we're kind of building up this like tool belt of of different tools that are good at different problems. That's a really cool dichotomy. I guess I'd never really thought about it like quite that way, but I mean it's you're exactly right when what we do in traditional infosc or cyber security or just coding and programming developing. It's like there is an objective procedural truth and that is just the track that it goes down. Um, yeah, but for a lot of the artificial intelligence world, it's very wimly and, you know, tiny wimy. Uh, a non-deterministic kind of goes into a black box and it could be a different output every single time. Uh, that's smart. Sorry, I guess I'd never got that epiphany. Well, it's so obvious. No, it's cool. And I it's like to be honest this is part of what I love about the sort of software architecture side of this like why I started building Yella in the first place is that we have a lot of really cool tools at our disposal. AI is another cool one. Quantum once we get there will be another cool one. And a lot of like building value for people and solving problems is just being able to like pick the right tools. So yeah that's kind of how I think about it. Well I love this. I'm glad we opened the floodgates on a couple questions because please, please, please, genuinely for folks tuning in, hey, toss in your questions at any point. I know this is totally an AMA uh and we'll get any of those kind of out the door, but you do have the demo. You do have some show and tell. Do you want to dive into a couple more questions now or table them for after? Where are you feeling? I'm flexible. So, maybe the demo will answer some of those questions if you'd like to dive in. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So, first, um, I'm actually going to start on this tab. This is my absolute all-time favorite, uh, visual if you're trying to like wrap your head around what on earth is a quantum computer. So, quantum computers work on cubits where classical computers work on bits. And classical, I know I've just been like throwing that word around, but that's how people just refer to the type of computers that we have today, right? So any like your phone that's classical computer um your laptop everything that we have already is classical. So classical bits can be a zero which in this picture is blue or a one which in this picture is yellow. a cubit, you kind of think about it as a sphere and it can be in any if it's in superp position, it can be in any state in that sphere and then when you measure it, it will collapse to whichever of the colors or states it's closest to. So the reason I love this visual, especially with the colors, is you can see like, oh, this one is like green trending blue. It's going to collapse to zero. So that's my favorite visual. Um, I think it also kind of helps to conceptualize why classical computers and quantum computers are good at different problems. Because if if you think about an algorithm that maybe needs to try a bunch of different combinations of things, if you're operating in the classical world, to like get all of these different colors on this sphere, you're going to have to do a zillion combos of blue and yellow in different amounts a bunch of times over. But the cubit kind of inherently has that because it has all of the colors in its superp position. That's not like exactly scientifically correct the way that I say that way, but that's how I like to kind of conceptualize like, oh, it makes sense, but it's good at different problems because it's just kind of it like inherently has these different properties that the cubid the normal bit doesn't have. Does that make sense? Can I can I regurgitate and I'm sorry maybe again my smooth brain but for a cubit is it is it the case that it's no longer just the zeros and ones but in that visual in the picture is it like every conceivable point on the surface area of that sphere or is it like is it even kind of 3D all the like almost like infinite zero all the way to one 0.1.2 0.22 223 4 whatever. Uh how does that make a key space quote unquote? Okay, that's an interesting question too. So the the way that we conceptualize like key values. Okay, so let me back up. There's there's quantum computing. There's this thing called quantum key distribution. Whoa. Which is another just like cool um badass name. Yeah. Yeah. QKD. You can throw that around and be like, "Wow, I'm smart now." So, this is another cool like security related thing that quantum computers or like quantum computing, I guess, uh, can do. It gives us, if you look it up, you will see like, oh, it's an unhackable way to distribute keys. What that actually is doing is transmitting information via a quantum channel that we then measure and use as a classical key. Okay. So on this diagram you would like get all of the cubits that are like you know colorful but then you need to measure it in order to go use it. So we're still kind of collapsing it down to the zeros and ones to go use it. um slightly I'm going to back up just for one second but I mentioned if you look up QKD you'll see that it's unhackable and I did air quotes like this you see that a lot but what it actually means is that you will know if someone has eaves drop eve eavesdropped on that communication so it's not like it's not unhackable it's just that if you see that the key has been seen by someone else you'll be like okay I'm not going to use that lungs has been compromised. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's super interesting. It's really interesting. It's really really interesting. Yeah. Cool. Okay, I'm with you so far. Okay. Yeah. So, that I think that's just a good like let's try to wrap our heads around why um these two things are different. So, I'll hop over here now. So this is IBM Quantum Composer and you can actually I'm not even signed in. You can access this entire platform without having an account. How is the font size by the way? Is it like readable? Uh it looks good to me but I will relay to chat. Hey friends, folks tuning in. Can you see text on on screen a? Okay. I did set 1080p resolution this time. So don't hate me for that. Let me know if it looks good. Let me know if you can read it. Okay. Um, cool. So, what I love about this composer, I'm a very visual person in general, so I like that they have the sphere down here that you can look at. And then as you mess with, um, cubits up here, which I'll show you in just a second, it will show you the Kizkit uh, which is the Python library that IBM has for doing quantum programming. It'll show you that code on the side. So you can actually just like copy this out into your code editor and go run it. Um I think if you sign in, yeah, it says sign in to run your circuit. So if you sign in, you could also run this on their computers sometimes simulators depending. So okay, what are we looking at here? So off to the left over here, these are all of the gates. They call them gates that we can apply to the cubits. So something to keep in mind here when you're doing quantum programming, at least with where we are today, it's a there's like less abstraction going on than when you're writing code for normal computers, right? Like we don't we're not operating and telling every single bit when to flip when we're writing normal code, but we're just like we're not there yet with quantum. So you actually are doing that. You're applying the actual gates. You can think about this if you're doing like and or exor or whatever on bits in um normal code which you probably are not. That's kind of what you're doing with these cubits. So all of these are the different gates that you can apply. I have this tab open here the quantum logic gate like a PDI which just show shows you the names of all of the different gates and then the operation that they're applying. So we won't go into all of this. Ma matrices also break my brain a little bit but quantum computers are doing a lot of matrix math just short version. So it shows you also the operation that is being applied to the cubit. Um okay and then these are the actual cubits on IBM's composer and I think most of them do it this way. The cubit is initialized in a zero state. So it's actually initialized in like a classical zero state. Um it's just like it measures to a zero when it's initialized. Um what else is interesting in here? This down here on the bottom left shows the measured state of the cubit. Right? So, I know I keep doing these like air quotes, which is probably not super helpful, but basically what that means is the the quantum computers, they're going to be initialized in these like measured states. They're not in superp position when they start, but once you start applying gates, they will be, you know, going all around their sphere and going to the different colors and stuff. This down here will show you what that cubit will measure to. So right now we have two cubits and you can see that all it it's saying this is a probability percentage which is another technicality of quantum computers. They all of these outputs that you will see will often run maybe like a th00and 2,000 of the same operation and it will tell you like oh 51% of the time it came out to this 50 49% it came out to to this because it's just like it just depends how the cubit collapses down to zero or one after all these operations are applied. Um, okay. So, it's saying 100% both of these cubits are going to collapse to zero. We see 0 0. And that's because they both are initialized in the classical zero state. And then this is what that vector looks like on the sphere. Okay. I feel like I avoided I've started to go down tangents and then just like nudge back in. So hopefully that was not too chaotic. Uh, but that's kind of a a quick guide to what you're looking at when you're in this this quantum composer view. Okay. I think that the two things that are cool that we can look at. So two cool properties of cubits that classical bits don't have. The first is superp position. So remember that's this on the sphere. This is a classical bit which can only be zero or one. The cubit can be anything in there. Um, property two is entanglement. So, you can actually like entangle slash I don't know, it's not really connecting, but you can like make a relationship between two cubits and then the state of one cubit will actually affect the state of the other. So, that's kind of another cool property. And I can show you how to do both of those things in uh IBM Composer. And then you'll also see it in the code here on the right. So how do we put a cubit into superp position? All you have to do actually is apply this hgate. So what just happened? I put an hgate here. And if we come down here to look, we're going to get it's saying 0 0 will happen 50% of the time and 01 will happen 50% of the time. So what is this telling us? One of these bits is always going to be zero. That's because one of these bits is always going to be zero. Right? This Q1 initialized to to uh zero and we haven't done anything to it. So that one will always come out to zero. Q0 we put into superposition. And down here we can see that one of one of the bits is 50% of the time coming out as a zero and 50% of the time coming out as a one. Which means we successfully put it into superp position and when it was measured maybe the thousand times the computer ran half half those times it came out and collapsed to a zero and the other half it came out and collapsed to a one. Does that make sense? It does. It's too cool. Yeah. And it's also like what on earth? This is not how normal things work. The composer though is very very slick. Like just being able to kind of poke and play and uh that visualizer is so cool. That's really so cool. Yeah, that's really cool. Um um a question came through. Is this a simulator of a quantum computer just for clarity or are we running on a real quantum machine? I think the former, right? Yeah. So most of the time when you're well a when you're in visual views like this but b even when you're trying to run your code on like IBM cloud or Azure has one as well. I think Google has one too actually. Um most of the time it actually will run on a simulator unless you specifically say like I want to run on an actual quantum computer which you can do often you'll be kind of tossed into a queue you know and they'll like ceue everybody through so you'll process eventually. Um, the reason for that though is because real real quantum computers, we kind of touched on the beginning that we they're not big enough yet to solve any of these problems that classical computers can't solve. Meaning that we can actually just simulate it with a classical computer and not like use the super expensive actual quantum machine for things that, you know, we already have compute power to do. But yeah, you you can run stuff on actual quantum computers if you want to. I was not even tracking that those are like an available thing on AWS or or Google or any of those. That's that's wild. Yeah, I know. It's awesome. It's really cool. Um let's just put the second cubit into superp position as well. So, okay, before I do that though, if we can try to predict what will happen here. So we know that when I put the first one into superp position, half the time it collapsed to zero and half the time it collapsed to one. The second cubit is always zero because we it's initialized to zero. We didn't do anything to it. So when we drop this um hatamard, that's the long name for this. When we drop the hatamard gate onto here, what we should expect to happen is get 25% probability of all four of these states because now both cubits have the like 50% possibility of being zero or one. So let's do it. Yeah. So now we can see 25% of the time both of them measured to zero. 251 2510 and 2511 and I don't know if folks caught it uh but over on the right hand side right for the the quizkit or the python and forgive me I don't know if those are one and the same or sort of together python or quizkit or both uh but making changes in the drag and drop guey is of course updating and refreshing the code on the right that's cool yep yeah it's really cool and what we have uh here as well if you guys were reading this and you're like why is there a quantum and a classical so this is kind of related I mentioned in QkD what we do is like you send the you know key using quantum information over this channel but then you measure it and use it as as classical data that's kind of like kind of same concept here so we're initializing a quantum register that has two cubits and then we als also need a classical register to store the measured outputs after. So you you you make the cubits, you measure after you do your circuit, but you have to like store the measurements somewhere. And that's actually all the quantum computers that run today kind of pair alongside a classical computer. Um that is like an interesting rabbit hole. If anyone is interested to look up like these architectures, they it's it's always a classical computer and a quantum computer paired together and some like adapter layers in between basically. Okay. So, let me take this one off. And the next thing we can do is entangle two cubits. So to entangle we need this gate right here which is called a C knot. And what you need to do in order to get two cubits entangled, one of them needs to be in a superp position already. Well, I guess you technically could apply this gate without doing that, but you want one of them to be in a super position. And then you can put the C not gate on. You want the control cubit. So this C knot stands for controlled knot. So if anyone if you think back to like logic class um this is kind of like an exor gate where you're like you're looking at the first bit to decide if you should flip the second bit. It's kind of like that. So it's going to use the state of Q0 here which is in a superp position to affect the state of Q1. So let me take it off and apply it again just so that we can kind of see the difference in the probabilities here. So before I applied the C knot which puts them into uh entanglement we see that the measured outputs are 0 0 or 01. Okay. Once we apply this now the outputs are 0 0 and one one. So we know that this worked because these two cubits are entangled. So now anything kind of I'm abstracting a little bit here but like anything that happens to this Q0 is going to happen to the Q1. So we can see that the only output states now are output states where the two values are the same. Okay. And you can see over here in the code two, we made the circuit that had the uh quantum registers and the classical registers. And then we did circuit.h to the first cubit. And that was this gate. And then we did circuit CX, which is how you add this C knot gate. And we're saying, yep, we're saying zero is the control cubit and one is the target cubit. Lot of good questions coming through. Can this operation kind of be reversed? Keeping and and I don't know, forgive me if this is the right terminology. Keeping the H on both gates for Q1 or that was a question in the chat. Forgive me if I keeping H both gates on Q1. Um I guess I'm not exactly sure what the question is asking but it does bring up it it brings up an interesting point which maybe is what this person was asking about. So um another interesting property of quantum logic gates let's say in classical logic gates you can't always get back the inputs based on the output. So what that means is like there are some logic gates in um classical computers where maybe there are like four inputs and let's say you do and across all four of them and get an output. There's more than one set of inputs that could lead to like a zero and more than one set of outputs that could more than one set of inputs that could lead to a one. Meaning that if you just have a zero or one, you actually don't know what all the inputs were. Um that's so all of that to say those gates are not always reversible because you can't always get to the same input information from the output information. Quantum gates are not like that because they operate in like matrix multiplication. It's not lossy. You're not like losing information as you apply gates. You can always apply um different gates or whatever to get back to the input state if you want. You're it's like you preserve all of the information as you apply all the gates. And are all these operations and kind of a little bit more finer details than what each of those could do? Are those kind of hey wrapped up summarized and all bundled and pretty in your upskill challenge? Yeah, we do we do a little bit of this. We do more than just the H and the C knot. So you'll get to you'll get to do a little bit more. Um, yeah, they're I think I think this I do link to the composer in the upscale challenge. So, you'll see the link in there. It's really fun. Like I said, I'm just a visual person. So, it's fun to start applying all of these gates and be like, wait, what does it do if I do this? What does it do if I do that? Because all of the gates, what they're doing is like rotating the sphere kind of in some way. And so you can sort of see that happening in this visualization from composer which is cool. Cool. Yeah. I'm sorry to keep pulling us away. Was there more of the demo, more things you wanted to Hey, fireworks to set off or I think if there are more questions, we can dive into those. There are a ton of more questions. It's awesome. I just didn't know if you wanted to go in that direction or if there was more to play with here. There's always more to play with, but I think we we planted some good seeds. I think, like I said, this is available for anyone to go play with. So, I super encourage anyone to do that. And it's got Yeah, the visuals are so nice and you can just kind of drag and drop. So, I say go for it. Well, tons of questions in the chat. Uh I don't know if any of these catch your eye, if you're scrolling through or not. Um, oh, I see one on what material is a cubit made out of. So, that's a good question. And this is also another a rabbit hole you can go down if if you're interested. It's Friday before a long weekend here in the US. So, maybe if anyone needs a fun weekend rabbit hole, um, there are a few different ways that we can build cubits. So, uh, you can build them with ions. You you'll see like ionic cubits. Um there are like photonic cubits that try to use light. So the different labs take different approaches and kind of have their own like call it philosophy for why they think the cubit type that they chose will be the one that kind of works in the end, right? Like we're still sort of betting on these different tactics because it's just hard like science. So yeah, there are different types. Let's see. There were some early on that were really wondering like, okay, what if these uh are we going to have quantum computers like as a personal device? Are these do we think we'll ever be in a world where oh, we have these things at home? Maybe. I mean, I don't know. I think it's hard to say. I feel like people probably felt that way about classical computers a long time ago. Right now, these quantum computers are massive. They're super big. Um, most of them require like super intense refrigeration. So, it's not even a normal like building that these are in, right? They have to be in these very very controlled environments. Um, that's another interesting rabbit hole. I'm just throwing rabbit holes at you guys. uh quantum error correction is a whole field of study. So part of the reason like they have to be kept really really cold in order to you know be useful in any way but they're also very hard to keep stable. um meaning that like I don't know they will react to things in the environment and then if you measure them they'll like come out differently or maybe the the superp position will collapse and it you know it won't be able to stay in superp position long enough for you to do anything useful. Um this was actually one of the cool announcements on Google's Willow chip a couple months ago. I think actually right around the last time that we chatted. they had some breakthrough on error correction in particular, just showing that like, oh, it actually might be possible to continue growing the sizes of these quantum computers without the error growing exponentially, too. So, anyway, that was like a bit of a tangent, but there's a lot of environmental factors, a lot of just like engineering that goes into these things existing in physical space right now. So, like maybe we'll get to having them at home sometime. I don't think it'll be anytime soon, though. Um I will also I saw that Schubam was saying the last question was a typo. I was trying to say Q1 has so if Q1 had both H and the C knot um that's a good question too. So the when you apply H to one cubit so put one cubit in superp position and then do the C knot to entangle it with a second one a second one that's initialized to zero. This is called a bell state. So what a bell state is is when two cubits are maximally entangled meaning that the state of one like most strongly affects the state of the other. You could put both of them in superp position and then entangle them and they will be like I guess technically they're still entangled but the effect that one will have on the other is not as strong. Weird science. I'm getting to that point. I don't know if you could tell. It's like, man, is it is it just early on a Friday or gears were turning? Weird science. Yeah, exactly. Is matrix multi multiplication like a lattice? Yeah. So, um it sounds like someone has been reading their post quantum resistant cryptography papers. So there's a whole like strategy I guess in quantum resistant cryptography called lattice based cryptography and that it's basically matrices. That's what that means. But yeah it like that math will be secure both to quantum computers and classical computers. There was one question is this available as an API? And I wasn't quite sure what that was leading towards. I don't know if it's IBM's composer or oh just being able to use Kizkit or Kizkit in in an easy or streamlined way uh from any of the cloud machines that offer it. Yeah, most of them have SDKs. So actually I think all three of four four there's four that I can think of. There's probably more but the ones I have played with um KisKit has their like Pythones package. Azure has a nice SDK for theirs as well which has good support in VS Code as you would um imagine. Google also I believe has an SDK for theirs and then Amazon Braet is what their platform is called. So lots of options out there. Broad question. I don't know if it's something to dance with, but how do you approach solving problems that we kind of know today like where classic again air quotes uh classic intuition or the classic approach just wouldn't work or or fails in quantum contexts I suppose. Can you does that make sense? Yeah. So this is this is kind of interesting. The entire field of let's say commercializing research around quantum is super interesting because for a long time we've had the theory behind all of the algorithms that work better on quantum computers. So you can almost think about it as like if you know the nature of the problem that you're struggling with in the classical world. If it can be mapped to a problem that maybe a quant quantum computer can do better, then that might be a good thing to try. Right? So, it's all about like can you decompose this down to um I don't even know what you would call that like the the most core like what category of problem is it and what tools do we have in either world to attack that category of problem. Well, if I have a question for you, if that's a okay, and more to you, more on kind of what you're up to now in thinking through all this because I know and you've told me and you're obviously a genius and a lot of these different directions between cryptography and between oh, some AI and quantum. Where does this all kind of sit for you right now? is is again maybe the AI direction kind of what you're chasing and playing with next or Ardan do you blend these two worlds, three worlds, etc. Yeah, it's such a good question. I feel like it's something I don't know in some ways I feel like we're all on this journey, right? We're like, wait, what do I even like to do? What am I up to? Um, I think what I'm what I'm running at and where I really like to be, I think the cryptography world kind of instilled this in me too. Like cryptography is one of those things that is invisible to a lot of people. Um, so you have to be really confident in the engineering. The engineers have to be really confident in the engineering, but the people using it don't have to worry, right? like they can just feel confident that like, oh, this is going to work. My data is going to be protected. It's fine. Um, I think like that's kind of those are the types of things that I like to build and that's kind of I think where all of these things converge for me is I want people to be able to feel like they can build and the systems behind them and supporting them are just trusted and secure and robust and like understandable and not going to be throwing weird wrenches at them all the time. Um, so that's really like where I like to operate kind of in that maybe you'd call it like platformy world where it's like I just need this thing to exist and work and if I need to know how it works I can go figure it out but like it just needs to do its thing. I like that. I think that's, you know, pretty pragmatic. That's that's smart. That's sharp. That's just getting to the core of like what matters, what's important, making sure it does what it needs to do. Does what it needs to do. Yeah. Yeah. And we have we're getting to a really cool place I think in the kind of software tech security space where things can happen a lot faster. you can do things maybe with like gen like I don't know details of things are starting to be automatable right and so now it's like okay if we zoom out how can we actually connect all of these things together in a way that's that still works and I don't know is is understandable and and makes sense for the context excellent Ellie thank you thank you thank you again and again you know a thousand times I say this too often I'm a little bit of a broken record but I do really genuinely super appreciate you making some time to hang out with us uh doing a live stream like this. I know it's weird kind of, you know, off the cuff shooting from the hip, having fun, but uh especially thank you for all your contributions. Thank you for the upskill challenges, quantum programming, quantum computing, all that fun