A new programming language called QUA has been released by a quantum computing start-up called Quantum Machines. The language runs on the Quantum Orchestration Platform proprietary for the startup.
Quantum Machines claims its aim is to complete the “stack” at the very lowest level which involves quantum computing. Yeah, certain physical interactions between quantum bits (“qubits”) are what separates quantum computers from conventional hardware — but you do need the rest of the hardware to transform physical interactions into anything that runs software on.
And, you need the software too, of course. It is here that QUA falls in.
“The transition from having just specific circuits—physical circuits for specific algorithms—to the stage at which the system is programmable is the dramatic point,” CEO Itavar Siman told Tech Crunch. “Basically, you have a software abstraction layer and then, you get to the era of software and everything accelerated.”
In its materials the language Quantum Machine describes is not what you think of when you imagine programming, unless you are a machine language coder. What is the language of machines? That’s the lowest level of code possible, where the instructions are not in “natural” or human language and are instead in tiny bits of direct hardware instruction itself.
Coder Ben Eater made a great video that walks you through a sample program written in C, a language higher and more abstract, and how that information translates into machine code all the way down. (Everything essentially gets much messier to the human eye and much less “readable”.)
Machine code acts as a reminder that everything within the device moves nano-Morse code back and forth to do anything you see on the screen, as well as all the procedures and teamwork behind the scenes. Because quantum computers provide a whole new model for the whole concept of technology, a modern software code opens up.
Quantum Computers appears to want to create the whole quantum network to monitor and show it, from hardware to all applications.
And if this seems too simplistic or like an skewed interpretation of how to implement modern technologies, we’ve got some bad news for you about the home PC wars of the 1980s or the market share this Microsoft Windows still retains across operating systems. By providing a “box deal” with anything for everybody while quantum computing isn’t even a twinkle in the typical consumer’s eye, Quantum Computers might give anything for anyone In essence a common language.
“QUA is what we believe the first candidate to become what we define as the ‘quantum computing software abstraction layer,” Sivan told TechCrunch. In 20 years we might look back on QUA the way DOS is viewed by today’s users.
