Quantum Computing as a Sign of the Sino-Anglo Times

The film/TV series Firefly envisioned a somewhat far future in which humanity spreads out throughout the stars speaking a mixture of mostly English and Mandarin Chinese. In the near future, one milestone by which we can determine whether Mandarin is approaching English to that degree comes into view as we keep a lookout for situations in which to understand the cutting edge of technology, one must understand Mandarin.

In the field of quantum computing, we are arguably approaching that milestone. Last year in 2018, a People’s Republic of China (PRC)-based company, Origin Quantum, released platforms simulating a 64-qubit quantum computer, surpassing the theoretical quantum supremacy threshold of a 50-qubit quantum computer.

Origin Quantum has published extensive documentation in Mandarin both on their own website and externally to enable Mandarins-speakers to up their quantum computing platform using C++. Perhaps to encourage adoption among developers not comfortable with C-family languages, Origin Quantum later released a Python wrapper for its quantum computing platform as the pyQPanda package in September 2018.

Unfortunately, Origin Quantum has not yet published extensive documentation on using its Python wrapper, whether in Mandarin or English, as of the publication of this article in June 2019. Apart from the barebones help documentation of the company’s pyQPanda package that users can view after installing it, the only publicly-available Python support anywhere is a…