Closed jotterbach closed 6 years ago
I was also thinking that this would be a great idea; furthermore, it might be useful to have a plugin for popular Python IDEs such as PyCharm which would let you construct the circuit graphically (i.e. a drag and drop interface) while the pyQuil instructions are generated automatically (which is the requested feature in reverse, so this may belong in another issue).
I don't think it's a bad idea necessarily, however, I will note the following:
Basically, the subtext of all of the above is that we should move away from, not closer to, programming graphically. But understandably every textbook and paper on quantum computation uses these diagrams, so it may have some value.
You could use something like this: https://github.com/CQuIC/qcircuit/
QPIC could also be used https://github.com/qpic/qpic
In reading the documentation for QPIC, it supports more useful functionality (such as adding text in places and sizing things). Because it is more powerful than qcircuit, it is probably going to be of more utility to you all.
If you end up going with qcircuit and have suggestions for improvements on our end, we could work with you to fold those into the package as appropriate.
If someone contributed a patch or even just an initial sketch of qcircuit we would probably use that. I'd love to work on this myself but probably won't get around to it for a few weeks or so.
Having a simple function call to generate and visualize the Quantum Circuits that are created from a pyQuil instruction set is useful for several reasons: