IBM Quantum announces Fourth Annual Quantum Award!

IBM Quantum made a big announcement on 29^th November 2021. IBM Quantum has announced the Fourth Annual Quantum Award and the Second Annual Open Science Prize. The Open Science Prize in an Open Source Competition that aims at finding open-source solutions to the most pressing and long standing problems in the field of Quantum Information. The announcement was made by Qiskit on 29^th November 2021 on their official Twitter account.

The 2021 Edition of the Open Science Prize will feature a problem in the field of Quantum Information that is solvable through one of the two approaches. The best solution from each approach will be awarded $40,000 each, with the overall winner being awarded another $40,000 which takes the overall prize sum to $100,000.

The Problem

Simulating The 2021 Edition of the Open Science Prize asks participants to simulate a Heisenberg model Hamiltonian for three interacting atoms on IBM Quantum’s 7-qubit Jakarta system. The goal of the competition is to simulate the evolution of a known quantum state with the best fidelity as possible using Trotterization. Participants can choose to approach the problem through one of the following approaches-

• Qiskit Pulse
• Qiskit defaults

Rules

1. Each team or participant may only contribute to one submission.
2. Solution may only be executed on the designated device (ibmq_jakarta).
3. Each submission must use Trotterization to evolve the specified state, under the specified Hamiltonian, for the specified duration with at least 4 Trotter steps.
4. Only use Open Pulse and or pulsed gates functionality as outlined in the included Jupyter notebooks.
5. Only use libraries that can be installed using either pip install or conda install and no purchased libraries.
6. Document code with concise, clear language about the chosen methodology.
7. State tomography fidelity (for 4 or more trotter steps) must meet a minimum value of 30%.

Evaluation Criteria

The solutions to the competition will be judged on the following criteria-

1. Performance as measured by the state tomography fidelity in comparison to other submissions (Max 15 points)
2. Clarity of provided documentation and solution code (Max 5 points)
3. Creativity in developing a unique, innovative, and original solution (Max 5 points)

The competition comes to an end on 16^th April 2022, following which the judging for the competition commences.

You can learn more about the IBM Quantum Fourth Annual Quantum Award Competition on the IBM Quantum’s Blog for the same, here.

You can go through the announcement page, here.