Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) have developed their new programming language – Twist – for quantum computing.
Quantum computing is different from conventional computing as it uses qubits to encode information as zeros or ones, or both simultaneously. Therefore, conventional programming languages can not be used in quantum computing.
The newly developed programming language Twist can effectively describe and confirm which knowledge items are entangled in a quantum program. The information displayed by Twist is in a language that is easily understandable to a classical computer programmer.
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MIT Ph.D. pupil Charles Yuan said, “Because understanding quantum programs requires understanding entanglement, we hope that Twist paves the way to languages that make the unique challenges of quantum computing more accessible to programmers.”
He further added that their developed language enables developers to write safer quantum computing programs explicitly stating when a qubit must not be entangled with another.
One of the major benefits of quantum computing is that it can be used to solve highly complex problems with a minimal number of qubits if the right programs are run. Twist was created by the researchers at MIT to be expressive enough to jot down applications for well-known quantum algorithms and identify problems in their implementations.
Scientists also tested that programming language, in which it was found that Twist has lower than 4% overhead when compared to current quantum programming strategies.
“By introducing and reasoning about the ‘purity’ of program code, Twist takes a big step toward making quantum programming easier by guaranteeing that the quantum bits in a pure piece of code cannot be altered by bits, not in that code,” said the Seymour Goodman Professor of Laptop Science on the University of Chicago, Fred Chong.
