How To Program Your Own Quantum Computer or QUBE: QUantum computing for BEginners

Abstract: Do you think you need to know quantum physics to understand how a quantum computer works? Nope, no worries there. You don't need a deep dive into physics or mathematics, just a bit of familiarity with vectors and matrix multiplication. That's really it. A good handle on Python programming and a few numpy functions will do the trick, specifically reshape(), kron(), matmul(), swapaxes(), linalg.norm(), and random.choice(). In fact, an appendix shows that twelve lines of Python code suffice to define a complete simulator. The whole point of this article is to give you an informal, brief, hopefully digestible and educational description of how you can easily implement your own quantum computer simulator. It's not about `Yet Another Quantum Computer Simulator' (YAQCS?), which are a dime a dozen, but about how to build your own. And, honestly, there's probably no better way to learn how a quantum computer works!