QOSF Monthly Challenges

Repository containing monthly challenges in quantum computing.

Current Challenge

Link to Problem Notebook: Challenge 07 - unitaryHACK!

Release date: May 14th, 2021

Submission deadline (optional): May 30th, 2021

How it Works

These challenges will help you hone your general quantum computing skills by tackling some problems.

We release a new question every month. These are open to everybody and you're welcome to try your hand at solving them either individually or as a team.

• You are free to use any framework that you like, and submit your solutions in any format. Just make sure they're easy to evaluate.

You're also welcome to contribute challenge questions! Open an issue on this repo and describe the question, we'll take a look at it!

Tentative Timeline

• We will try and release each challenge on the same date every month.
• You get a month's time to solve each question, but if you wish to have your solution reviewed please aim to submit your solution within the first 2 or 3 weeks (to allow for sufficient time for reviews).

Submission

• Please fork this repository and use that to work on your solutions to the challenges.
  • Follow the folder structure that you see here. For each challenge, create a directory in your repo called challenge-xx, where xx is the challenge number.
  • Under this directory, create a folder with your github username (all lowercase, separated-by-hyphens). Your solution goes into this directory.
• If you complete a challenge and want to "submit" your solution, raise a Pull Request (PR) from your repo to ours.
• If your solutions works, we'll merge it to our repo.
• The best ones will be given a shout-out! 😃
• Note that if you're working as a team, it is sufficient to submit just one PR.

Evaluation

• We want this to be a community driven project, so evaluation will be in the form of peer reviews.
• Please take some time to go through other solutions and provide your feedback! The only way this will work well is if we learn from each other.
• If you like a solution, please leave an emoji reaction with a 👍 on the PR. We need some feedback for picking the best submissions.

Communication

• Please join the Slack channel for the challenge, where you can ask any questions you might have: #monthly-challenges

Git FAQ

• We recommend you install the new GitHub CLI tool which is pretty cool.
• Forking: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/getting-started-with-github/fork-a-repo
  • Pro tip: If you're using the CLI we just told you about, you can do this without ever leaving the terminal! Run gh repo fork qosf/monthly-challenges. When asked if you want to clone the repository, hit n.
• Cloning (first time setup):
  • git clone htps://github.com/{{your-github-username}}/monthly-challenges.git
    • If you're using the CLI, just run gh repo clone {{your-github-username}}/monthly-challenges.
  • run git remote add upstream https://github.com/qosf/monthly-challenges.git. You DO NOT have to do this if you used the CLI to clone your repo (it does that automatically).
  • run git checkout main
• What to do before starting a new challenge:
  • Bring your fork on-par with our repo

      git fetch upstream
      git checkout main
      git merge main upstream/main
      git push
    

  • Create a branch to work on the new challenge
    • git branch -b {{branch name}}
• Work on the challenge (make sure your changes are all on the right branch).
• Periodically push your changes to your fork
  • git push -u origin {{branch name}} the first time you push. For subsequent pushes, just git push.
• Raising a Pull Request: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/collaborating-with-issues-and-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests

Any other questions? Try the GitHub documentation or ping us on Slack!

Previous Challenges

Challenge 01: Diagonal Unitaries
Release date: November 2nd, 2020
Submission deadline (optional): November 23rd, 2020

---

Challenge 02: Minimum Hamming Distance
Release date: December 10th, 2020
Submission deadline (optional): January 9th, 2021

---

Challenge 03: Minimum Makespan
Release date: January 10th, 2020
Submission deadline (optional): February 9th, 2021

---

Challenge 04: QOSF Mentorship Screening Tasks
Release date: February 18th, 2021
Submission deadline (optional): March 17th, 2021

---

Challenge 05: Quantum Autoencoders (QML)
Release date: March 19th, 2021
Submission deadline (optional): April 18th, 2021

---

Challenge 06: Mermin-Peres Magic Square Game
Release date: April 22nd, 2021
Submission deadline (optional): May 21st, 2021