QHack 2023 Highlights

Thousands of participants, over 100 countries represented, six events, 37 Streaming Sessions, 28 unique Coding Challenges and a prize-packed Open Hackathon.

This is QHack 2023.

Call it a fan expo, hackathon or scientific conference, QHack is a one-of-a-kind event that has been bringing people together for four years to celebrate all things quantum. This year featured top notch scientific talks, engaging demos, coding challenges, a puzzle contest, meme contest and an open hackathon. From international internships to 4090 GPUs, there were incredible prizes to be won. Read on to learn more and see who won what!

QHack-at-a-Glance
Pre-QHack Events
QHack Pillars
QHack Sponsors and Poster

QHack-at-a-Glance

Big, bold and bright — from February 13th–28th QHack had us dreaming in blue, red and yellow! But we weren’t the only ones — this year nearly 3,000 participants from more than 100 countries joined us to celebrate all things quantum.

Pre-QHack Events

It was an exciting lead-up to our signature events!

On January 3rd, we launched the first-ever QHack Puzzle Contest, a follow-up to the popular Design Competition of QHack 2022. As suspected, this event garnered a lot of interest and one common thread remains — the quantum community is seriously clever. 🎓

We loved looking through all of the puzzle submissions and are excited to share the winning puzzles that we’ve redrawn in the signature PennyLane style below:

Can you solve them all?

Hint — If you’re stuck, head on over to the PennyLane puzzle page and check out the tooltips for answers.

To keep the hype train rolling, we kicked off the iconic quantum Meme Contest on January 24th.

Is there anything better than waking up to a cup of coffee and some quantum memes? ☕🤣 The only thing we can think of is a live judging of top memes on Twitch — which is exactly what happened. Xanadu CTO — Software, Memeologist and all-around QHack legend, Nathan Killoran, joined QHack Host and Xanadu Quantum Community Manager, Catalina Albornoz, to judge eight finalists in a March-Madness-style bracket.

Only three could be victorious and here they are:

Thanks to everyone who participated for the LOLs. 😆

QHack Pillars

Streaming Sessions

Watching engaging talks and participating in discussions with leading scientists from the comfort of your own home? It’s no wonder the Streaming Sessions are a pillar of QHack. As a bonus this year, the speakers hung out on our new QHack Discord server after their talks to answer even more questions.

With topics ranging from “Quantum Steampunk: Quantum Information meets Thermodynamics” to “The Future of Quantum Programming”, there was a lot to unpack in the talks from this year’s star-studded speaker lineup.

We also featured demos hosted by our sponsors to ensure QHack participants were at the top of their game and in the know about the latest hardware and software updates (quantum and beyond!) before diving into the Open Hackathon.

All talks and demos are now available on our YouTube channel for you to explore — check them out here.

💥 Fun fact — all QHack music is designed in-house. Xanadu Quantum Computing Educator Isaac DeVlugt also doubled as QHack 2023 musician and you can find his music on our YouTube channel, as well. 😎

Coding Challenges

The Coding Challenges are an opportunity to test your coding skills and collaborate with teammates from across the globe. This year featured a shiny new challenge platform and tutorial sessions (that raised participation by 80% 😲) and a Coding Challenges Metastory — give it a read if you want a LOL and insight into challenge titles like “A Tale of Timbits” and “Fall of Sqynet”.

Solving all the Coding Challenges was a tall order this year, with 28 unique challenges that varied in difficulty from “easy-peasy” to “I don’t think enough coffee exists to solve this”. Nearly 800 teams battled it out over six days and keyboards must have been on fire, racking up a total of 17,500 submissions 🔥. Team Sky Barley wasted no time and solved ALL 28 challenges in exactly nine hours and nine minutes 🤯.

Congratulations to all who participated and solved challenges! A total of 40 teams managed to solve them all, and shout-out to the top five fastest teams who snagged some epic prizes and QHack swag, aka our 2023 Coding Challenge Champs: Sky Barley, SunnyDelft, Q-rious, JoongMulsilhagicilta and QuantumLegion.

Top 5 Teams

QHack 2023 Coding Challenges Leaderboard

Open Hackathon

You know we saved the best for last. Packed with jaw-dropping prizes, QHack 2023 came to a crescendo with the free-form Open Hacakthon.

This year there were seven challenges sponsored by dozens of noteworthy companies and institutions who contributed prizes valued at over $100K 🤯. Teams were invited to share their ideas and flip the quantum paradigms on their heads.

To kick-start their projects, hundreds of top Coding Challenge teams earned valuable Power-Ups — AWS Credits, priority access to IBM Quantum/PINQ² QPUs, time on GPUs by NVIDIA/Cyxtera Technologies/Run:ai and early access to QODA. A second round of Power-Ups were awarded after preliminary Open Hackathon projects were submitted — select teams scored a hardware boost to power their projects! 💪

We received so many submissions and are thrilled to announce the winners for each prize category:

Top Teams, Projects and Prizes

👁️ Visualization/Plotting Challenge

🥇 First Place Prize — Qualition
Project name: Quantum Image Processing - embeddings - from visualization to classification
Prize sponsored by: Atom Computing

One-person two-part trip.

Part 1: Office in Berkeley, California, USA to meet their team.

Part 2: Office in Boulder to meet their team and tour the facility.

🥈 Second Place Prize — QSpace
Project name: Quantum Tubes
Prize sponsored by: Rigetti

Early access to Ankaa™, Rigetti’s fourth generation 84-qubit system available in Q3 2023.

Up to four sets of Apple® AirPods®.

🥉Third Place Prize — Incho
Project Name: qXR (Quantum & Mixed Reality)
Prize sponsored by: Strangeworks

One year software license to the Strangeworks Enterprise level product with USD $3,000 in hardware credits.

The winners will get the opportunity to work with Strangeworks Director of Application development for up to 15 hours to develop and launch an application on the Strangeworks platform.

⚗️ Quantum Chemistry Challenge

🥇 First Place Prize — jetix
Project name: Molecular Energy Landscapes of HEA in Quantum Computing for Carbon Capture
Prize sponsored by: IBM Quantum & PINQ2

Block of 10 hours access on a 127-qubit Eagle processor.

🥈 Second Place Prize — CuriousTurtles
Project name: Krylov-fueled Iterative Quantum Assisted Eigensolver
Prize sponsored by: QunaSys

Two on-site internship positions for one month in Tokyo (full-time). The salary will be 300,000 JPY plus flight and accommodation.

Each team member will have the choice between either one Nintendo Switch™ Console or one set of Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones (maximum 4 electronic items in total).

🥉Third Place Prize — CQTech
Project name: Exploring Different VQE Methods for BeH2 Ground State on current NISQ devices: Hamiltonian, Ansatze, and Readout error reduction
Prize sponsored by: qBraid

Remote internship for 6 weeks with a salary of $6,000 USD (one spot).

Up to three sets of Apple® AirPods® for team members not participating in the internship.

🔀 Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing Challenge

🥇 First Place Prize — Qumpula Quantum
Project name: MatriQ
Prize sponsored by: Covalent

Up to four Apple Watches®

🥈 Second Place Prize — SunnyDelft
Project name: Searching ground state energy with Heisenberg-limit NISQ algorithm
Prize sponsored by: IQM

Collaboration between members of the winning team and IQM to support advancement of the winning team's work.

Up to 4 tickets for Superconducting Qubits and Algorithms Conference 2023 (in Munich). It includes a travel budget of up to €2,400 to be split among the whole team.

🥉Third Place Prize — CuriousTurtles
Project name: Krylov-fueled Iterative Quantum Assisted Eigensolver
Prize sponsored by: QuEra

Up to four reMarkable tablets with Marker and Folio

Atomic Certificate of Victory

📆 Quantum Computing Today! Challenge

🥇 First Place Prize — SunnyDelft
Project name: Searching ground state energy with Heisenberg-limit NISQ algorithm
Prize sponsored by: Classiq

One full-time paid remote internship. This will include a weekend trip to the Classiq offices in Tel Aviv. The total budget will be $5,000 USD.

Alternatively, if more than one team member qualifies for the internship, the USD $5,000 salary and travel expenses will be split among the team members.

Alternatively, team members may choose to forfeit the internship and instead opt for physical prizes (e.g., electronics) totalling up to USD $5,000.

🥈 Second Place Prize — Qumpula Quantum
Project name: MatriQ
Prize sponsored by: BEIT

One person trip to meet BEIT's team for an on-site research experience and tour their office in Kraków, Poland. Paid Expenses: Flight and accommodation.

Up to three sets of electronics (e.g., Apple® AirPods®, tablet, laptop) valued at approximately USD $750 for team members not participating in the trip to Kraków, Poland.

🥉Third Place Prize — Avocados
Project name: Enhancing Portfolio Optimization Solutions - Wisely Encoding Constrained Combinatorial Optimization Problems on Quantum Devices
Prize sponsored by: Multiverse Computing

One full-time, paid, on-site internship in San Sebastian, Spain. The duration is six months with a salary of EUR 1200 net and relocation package of up to EUR 2000.

For team members not participating in the internship, up to three sets of Apple® AirPods®.

🔇 QEC and Compilation Challenge

🥇 First Place Prize — LearnQPE
Project name: Learning Quantum Phase Estimation by Variational Quantum Circuits
Prize sponsored by: Nord Quantique

$5,000 USD paid one person trip to meet the Nord Quantique team and tour the ecosystem in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada.

Alternatively, the approximate USD $5,000 travel budget may be shared across all team members to meet the Nord Quantique team and tour the ecosystem in Sherbrooke, Quebéc, Canada. In addition, Nord Quantique pays for accommodations and meals.

🥈 Second Place Prize — my_favourite_team
Project name: Adaptative VQA optimizer
Prize sponsored by: Entropica Labs

Full-time remote internship for 3 months at USD $1,500 per month.

Alternatively, if more than one team member qualifies for the internship, the USD $1,500 per month salary will be split among the team members.

Apple® AirPods® 3rd Generation (up to 3) and Entropica T-shirts (up to 3).

🥉Third Place Prize — QOQI
Project name: Estimating Ground State Energy of Molecules using VQE with Qiskit Estimator Primitive in Qiskit Runtime
Prize sponsored by: AQT

Block of two hours access to AQT's QPU over the cloud.

💻 NVIDIA Challenge

🥇 First Place Prize — MFC
Project name: Accelerating Noisy Algorithm Research with PennyLane-Lightning and NVIDIA cuQuantum SDK
Prize: Up to four Geforce RTX 4090s GPUs (one per team member)

🥈 Second Place Prize — Durchmusterung
Project name: Using Quantum-enhanced Support Vector Machines and Quantum Convolutional Neural Nets for Stellar Classification
Prize: Up to four Geforce RTX 3090s GPUs (one per team member)

🥉Third Place Prize — TaipeiQC
Project name: Reinforcement Learning Quantum Local Search
Prize: Up to four Geforce RTX 3080s GPUs (one per team member)

All prizes sponsored by: NVIDIA

💻 Amazon Braket Challenge

🥇 Top 3 Prize — QuantuMother
Project name: Quantum Graph Neural Network for Graph Structured Data using Classical Initialization

🥇 Top 3 Prize — jetix
Project name: Molecular Energy Landscapes of HEA in Quantum Computing for Carbon Capture

🥇 Top 3 Prize — Avocados
Project name: Enhancing Portfolio Optimization Solutions - Wisely Encoding Constrained Combinatorial Optimization Problems on Quantum Devices

Each of the top 3 winning teams will receive:

Amazon Braket swag

Mini-mentorship meeting with an Amazon Scholar in Quantum Technologies

USD $10,000 in AWS hardware credits

Featured in a blog post on the AWS Quantum Technologies channel

USD $50 Amazon gift card for each member of the team

All prizes sponsored by Amazon Web Services

QHack Sponsors and Poster

We are incredibly proud to be members of this community — thanks to all who joined us for QHack 2023. This event would be nothing without the amazing quantum community and the generous support of our sponsors.