In July 2018 we announced the Quantum Katas—an open-source project containing programming exercises aimed at teaching quantum computing. This July we’re celebrating the first anniversary of the Katas; let’s look at the how the project grew and evolved during this year.
A year ago, we started with just four katas that covered the most introductory topics of quantum computing, such as superposition and measurement. Since then, 13 new katas were written, more than half of them contributed by our community: students learning quantum computing and just quantum computing enthusiasts! The new katas cover a range of topics, from simple algorithms like teleportation and superdense coding to more advanced applications like solving constraint satisfaction problems using Grover’s search algorithm. If you haven’t looked at the katas recently, check out the full list of the katas here.
Kata Notebooks are another important addition to the project: they are the same tasks, presented as Q# Jupyter Notebooks. They can be solved online, without having to install the Quantum Development Kit on your machine. Again, thanks to our community members most of the katas are already available in the new format. You can try them online here.
Finally, Q# Jupyter Notebooks enable a whole world of new possibilities for helping everybody learn quantum computing. These include tutorials that explain a topic using a mix of theory, visualizations, Q# code samples or small demos and programming exercises. The first of these tutorials offers an in-depth exploration of the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm, one of the most famous algorithms in quantum computing.
You can read more about the evolution of the Quantum Katas over the past year on our developer blog. We look forward to your feedback and contributions as we keep working on creating new tutorials to aid your learning!