Throwback to qBraid’s HAQS

From October 21st to November 5th of 2022, qBraid hosted HAQS, one of the most popular quantum computing events of the year, where participants from around the world worked on solving a total of five quantum computing challenges during the two weeks of the event.
No less than 22 talks were given by speakers with a wide range of backgrounds on a variety of topics covering NISQ algorithms, applications of quantum computing in the automotive industry, quantum machine learning, neutral atoms quantum computing, cloud platforms for quantum computing, and more!
CQTech, partnering with Womanium Quantum, has provided support to qBraid in the organization of the event and its members have been among the judges for the Hackathon.
After the success of HAQS 2022, the qBraid platform will also be used in iQuHACK 2023, MIT’s upcoming Hackathon.

Launch day and challenges announcements

HAQS 2022 kicked off on the 21st of October with a first talk given by qBraid CEO and co-founder Kanav Setia who introduced the platform and its many features to participants from over sixty countries! The event’s challenges, proposed by QuSTEAM, QOSF, and qBraid, were also revealed respectively during the talks of Bennett Brown, Alberto Maldonado, and Ryan Hill.
The first day of HAQS also saw a talk from Jordan Sullivan, a lead developer advocate from Amazon Braket (AWS), one of the event’s sponsors, who gave an overview on Braket and how to use it from the qBraid platform.

More talks during HAQS

Throughout the Hackathon, more talks were given, twice each week, by speakers from Amazon Web Services, BMW, MIT, Pasqal, Capgemini, Los Alamos National Laboratory, QuSTEAM, Sandia National Labs, and USRA/NASA, to name a few. The full list can be found at https://qbraid.com/haqs/.
While the participants were working on their respective challenges, they had the opportunity to keep the larger view of the quantum computing field in mind by following the high quality presentations delivered by the speakers.

The Hackathon

Of course, the main focus of the event were the challenges provided by QuSTEAM, QOSF, and qBraid.
The hosts of HAQS proposed two challenges: an open qBraid SDK challenge, and a QML challenge. While QuSTEAM and QOSF respectively proposed a challenge exploring entanglement, and a set of tasks from the monthly QOSF challenges.

For the QML challenge, the participants had to build a Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) that achieved a near perfect accuracy, following the work of Havlíček et al., while minimizing the costs of execution on a real quantum computer. Team Qualition won the VQC challenge with an astonishingly low execution cost of $25.58 for the given task.
However, as many teams managed to achieve a perfect accuracy, a tie-breaker challenge was also proposed by qBraid. In this one, the competing teams were asked to build a Quantum Kernel Estimator (QKE) for a Support Vector Machine. With both solutions taken into account, it was team CSDL who came on top as the winners of the overall QML challenge.

The qBraid SDK open challenge, which asked the participants to use the qBraid platform in an unconstrained and creative way, was won by team Kossakowski. The winners successfully used qBraids tools to execute Binary Quadratic Model quantum programs on D-Wave’s quantum annealers. CQTech members supported qBraid with reviewing the submitted solutions to the above-mentioned challenges.

As for the challenges by QuSTEAM and QOSF, they were won respectively by teams Quasar and Reverse_chandelier.

The winning teams shared a total of $3000 worth of prizes, 100 000 qBraid credits to use quantum devices through the platform, as well as an admission to iQuHACK 2023 for team Kossakowski and CSDL. Other top participants also received qBraid and Pennylane swag, QOSF memberships, and Amazon gift cards.

Beyond HAQS

More than just a Hackathon, HAQS has been a successful industry-focused quantum technologies’ event. Quantum computing will bring significant progress in scheduling, logistics, quantum chemistry, material science, and more, as was highlighted by the topics that were discussed during this event. And the qBraid platform is becoming one of the tools that will enable such progress. HAQS has also been a great opportunity for the quantum community, experts and newcomers alike, to explore the quantum software development features that qBraid offers. The possibility to access multiple quantum backends from one platform, the seamless handling of credentials and access to quantum resources using the qBraid credit system, and the management of python environments and packages for quantum computing, are some of what the participants to HAQS 2022 got to experience.
qBraid has surely gained a lot of attention during and since the success of its first Hackathon!