This post is part 4 of the QHack 2024 series
Thousands of participants, over 90 countries represented, a fun-filled in-person event with a star-studded speaker lineup, over 600 Coding Challenge teams, a generously sponsored Hackathon and US$200k in prizes.
QHack 2024 lived up to its adventurous theme. Read on to learn more and see who won what!
Contents
QHack-at-a-Glance
QHack is a world-renowned quantum hackathon featuring Coding Challenges, a free-form Open Hackathon, Streaming Sessions and life-changing prizes like internships, mentorships, access to exclusive technology and more. It’s a one-of-a-kind annual celebration of quantum computing anticipated by thousands across the globe. This year was the 5th QHack and may have been our best one yet; from February 8th–22nd, over 2,000 participants took a trip across Qutopia to join QHack 2024!
Pre-QHack Events
In anticipation of the main events, we wanted to get the QHack hype train rolling early! 🚂
We kicked things off right before the winter holidays by hosting several mini-competitions, like the QHack referral program and a draw for a copy of Maria Schuld’s book on quantum machine learning, and the iconic quantum QHack Meme Contest launched on January 24th.
We had a blast looking through all of the QHack Meme Contest submissions and even more of a laugh when our team took to the live stream to judge the competition in real-time.
Introducing 🥁 our top 2024 meme by @AlbertoMaldoQC:
Congratulations and thank you to everyone who participated!
QHack Main Events
QHack IRL
For the first time since QHack 2019, Xanadu HQ opened its doors for a jam-packed two-day in-person event!
It was amazing to see the buzz about the office, put faces to names and see the quantum community grow in real-time at QHack IRL.
Day one featured a welcome from Xanadu Founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook, amazing talks from quantum icons, a quantum careers masterclass, a thought-provoking panel about working in the field, social events and more! Here are some highlight photos. ✨
Day two was just as, if not more, exciting than the first! We hosted a mini-hackathon, had another round of amazing talks, including a panel discussion on what we’ve gotten right (and wrong!) about quantum computing so far and what’s to come, as well as possibly the first ever Quantum Jeopardy. Here are some highlight photos. ✨
Shoutout to our QHack IRL champ Marcus Edwards 🏆, a.k.a. team Quolumbia, for their project: Modified Singular Value Thresholding and Quantum State Tomography.
All recorded talks and demos are now available on the PennyLane YouTube channel for you to explore — check them out here.
Coding Challenges
Welcome to Qutopia, QHack 2024’s Coding Challenge world.
QHack Coding Challenges are an opportunity to test your coding skills and collaborate with teammates from around the globe. This year featured a challenge map with 21 unique problems across the fields of quantum machine learning, quantum chemistry, and quantum algorithms. We had 645 teams and a whopping 24,000 submissions 🤯
This year, Coding Challenge participants had the opportunity to not only score gift cards in value of US$7,500 and certificates of achievement but also unlock limited-time badges for their PennyLane Profiles (here is an example of a profile from Xanadu Senior Researcher Maria Schuld)! Top teams were also entered into the winners’ pool for access to exclusive interview opportunities, mentorships, internships, GPUs, hardware credits, swag and more. And the top teams also had the opportunity to win Power-Ups to take their projects to the next level in the Open Hackathon — GPU access provided by NVIDIA and Denvr Dataworks, or AWS Credits offered by AWS.
Congratulations to all who participated and a special shoutout to our top 5 teams who solved all 21 increasingly difficult coding challenges in just over 55 hours! 🏃
Top Teams
- CQTech — $2,500 gift card
- Mt. Gwankak NoruJump — $2,000 gift card
- cns_CAT — $1,500 gift card
- Kharkiv_team — $1,000 gift card
- queen_of_fog — $500 gift card
Open Hackathon
It wouldn’t be QHack without our prize-packed free-form QHack Open Hackathon!
The QHack Open Hackathon is an opportunity for participants to showcase their quantum skills on the world stage and win some incredible prizes. Participants are invited to share their ideas with the quantum community and demonstrate their creativity, problem-solving capabilities, and technical chops by building something unique. This year's Open Hackathon featured US$30,000 in gift card prizes and winners also earned the opportunity to enter the winners’ pool and gain access to exclusive prizes.
To kick-start their projects, hundreds of top Coding Challenge teams earned valuable Power-Ups — AWS Credits and access to GPUs provided by NVIDIA and Denvr Dataworks. In the middle of the Open Hackathon, a second round of Power-Ups was awarded to teams whose preliminary projects showed great promise — select teams scored yet another boost to power their projects, with even more NVIDIA GPUs and AWS Credits! 💪
We are thrilled to announce the winners for each prize category:
Top Teams and Projects
⚔️ Preparing for Battle
Challenge in which the participant will be asked to innovate in amplitude embedding techniques, a crucial task in many quantum and QML algorithms.
Challenge details:
A fundamental task in quantum computing is to devise methods to transfer classical information into a quantum computer. These techniques are called "Embeddings" and a widely used one is Amplitude Embedding. Given a vector x, it encodes each of its elements into the amplitudes of the wave function.
Finding a quantum gate decomposition that generates these states is no easy task and this is the challenge you will face! You will have to search the literature or come up with an innovative technique in order to build the circuit that generates an input vector using the amplitude embedding.
You can try to create exact methods or use quantum machine learning approximation techniques to reduce the number of gates needed. Originality, efficiency in number of gates used, and approximation to the solution state will be taken into account. Good luck!
Challenge winners:
🥇 First Place Prize: Curous Turtles — $3,000 gift card
Project: Hamiltonian simulation for solving PDE
🥈 Second Place Prize: team-penguin — $2,000 gift card
Project: Optimizing the depth of the Mottonen state preparation circuit in PennyLane
🥉Third Place Prize: Heidelberg Quantum — $1,000 gift card
Project: Parallel Amplitude Embedding
🌉 Bridging the Gap
The spectral gap is an important feature that allows us to obtain relevant information for instance in the study of batteries. The challenge here will be to design an algorithm capable of obtaining this value.
Challenge details:
Although in quantum chemistry we are always concerned with obtaining the ground state, this is not the only relevant information we can get from a molecule. Another important feature to calculate is what is known as the spectral gap. The spectral gap of a system is the energy difference between its ground state and its first excited state. There are many situations in which knowing this value is very important and your objective will be to design and implement a method that is able to obtain this quantity.
As always, you are free to choose your method. You can opt for techniques that use short circuits and approximate the value, or techniques designed for fault-tolerant computers that achieve high accuracy. We will value both the idea and the implementation.
Challenge winners:
🥇 First Place Prize: Qjins — $3,000 gift card
Project: Crossing The Gap Using VQE: A comparative study
🥈 Second Place Prize: The Office 215 — $2,000 gift card
Project: Spectral Gap Superposition States
🥉Third Place Prize: Qimi — $1,000 gift card
Project: Bridging the gap
🙊 The Sound of Silence
Entering the ISQ era, this challenge seeks techniques that reduce the number of qubits of different algorithms or quantum circuits. It is essential to be able to implement the applications found in quantum computing more quickly.
Challenge details:
Welcome to the forefront of the ISQ (Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era, where a thrilling challenge awaits you! Quantum computing is bound to transform industries ranging from energy, transport, financial, medical—you name it! However, we face a critical obstacle: our quantum computers, despite having become more noise-resistant, are still limited by the number of qubits. Most of the algorithms we dream of implementing do require a significant qubit count.
For example, implementing the Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) algorithm would be a crowning achievement for a quantum device. Among many other applications, QPE allows us to efficiently estimate the ground states of battery materials — a key step in simulating the chemical reactions needed to develop batteries with enhanced efficiency, reduced charging times, and improved thermal stability. However, in order to obtain the required precision, QPE must use many estimation wires. But there are ways around it! For instance, the Iterative Quantum Phase Estimation algorithm reduces the number of estimation qubits needed to just one.
Your goal in this challenge is to demonstrate an idea that reduces the number of qubits required in an algorithm. Go beyond conventional approaches and explore techniques like 'circuit cutting,' breaking down larger circuits into manageable segments. The correct resolution of this task could revolutionize the automotive and mobility industry, propelling us into a technologically advanced and environmentally sustainable future.
Challenge winners:
🥇 First Place Prize: queen_of_fog — $3,000 gift card
Project: Variational Quantum Algorithms in First Quantization
🥈 Second Place Prize: jetix — $2,000 gift card
Project: Simulating lithium-ion batteries on quantum computers
🥉Third Place Prize: Bohr's Cat — $1,000 gift card
Project: BeQUBO: Binary Encoding of Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization for Travelling Salesman Problem
👀 Seeing the Future
The evolution of a Hamiltonian plays an important role in numerous applications such as quantum chemistry. In this challenge the participant is tasked with finding efficient ways to create this operator.
Challenge details:
One of the tasks in which a quantum computer is expected to excel compared to a classical one is the simulation of quantum systems. The dynamics of a quantum system are usually represented by its Hamiltonian H. The complex exponential of the Hamiltonian is a very useful operator because it calculates how the system evolves over time. The construction of this operator is usually done through Trotter methods or more modern techniques such as QDrift. Your goal will be to implement state-of-the-art ways to construct the complex exponential of the Hamiltonian, or invent a new original way to achieve this task. Note that there are also more complex Hamiltonians that are time dependent where you could provide different techniques.
This evolution operator has many applications in different fields as chemistry or optimization tasks, it would be great if you could help us!
Challenge winners:
🥇 First Place Prize: Hamiltonian Squad — $3,000 gift card
Project: Multiparticle Quantum Tunnelling Simulation
🥈 Second Place Prize: Kuantum — $2,000 gift card
Project: Statistical Phase Estimation on PennlyLane
🥉Third Place Prize: Quantum_Questers — $1,000 gift card
Project: NISQ algorithm implementation inspired from Universal Quantum Algorithms
🍔 A Matter of Taste
Predicting the behavior of a spin system is not always an easy task. The challenge here is to select a spin system from available datasets and study its phase transition with the help of quantum computers.
Challenge details:
A possible application of quantum computers is to study condensed matter models. Condensed matter physics is often concerned with identifying phases and phase transitions in materials. An example phase transition is the transition from a normal metal to a superconducting metal as we lower the material’s temperature.
Given for instance, a Heisenberg spin system, with J_{xy}<0 and J_z < 0 we can find phase transitions of the spin system by analyzing how any property x of the system changes with respect to another and finding discontinuities. For example, x could be J_{xy}, J_z, or some other property.
Your challenge will be to come up with a quantum computing technique that can identify phase transitions in any of the spin systems we offer in our datasets. You could, for example, study the phase diagram or even develop machine learning algorithms to label the phases of the system. You are free to create your own questions and answers. Show us what you have learned!
Challenge winners:
🥇 First Place Prize: Kharkiv_team — $3,000 gift card
Project: Bridging the Gap is a Matter of Taste
🥈 Second Place Prize: HHRI TeamQC — $2,000 gift card
Project: Quantum-Train: Rethinking Hybrid Quantum-Classical Machine Learning in the Model Compression Perspective
🥉Third Place Prize: Team Name — $1,000 gift card
Project: Identifying Phases with Quantum Convolutional Neural Network
🕸 Amazon Braket Prizes
As a QHack 2024 Power-Up sponsor, AWS highlighted three teams with the best projects that used Amazon Braket in their hackathon project. Each team has won the opportunity to receive $10,000 in AWS Credits, a mentorship chat with an Amazon scientist, as well as an AWS blog post feature.
Challenge winners:
🏆 Top 3 Prize: The Office 215
Project: Spectral Gap Superposition States
🏆 Top 3 Prize: Team Name
Project: Identifying Quantum Phases with Quantum CNN
🏆 Top 3 Prize: Quantum_Questers
Project: UQA inspired NISQ algorithm Implementation
🖥 NVIDIA & Denvr Dataworks Prizes
As QHack 2024 Power-Up sponsors, NVIDIA and Denvr Dataworks highlighted three teams with the best projects that used NVIDIA GPUs and CUDA Quantum in their hackathon project. Each member of the three teams has won an NVIDIA GeForce 40x0 GPU of their own, a project discussion with NVIDIA, as well as an NVIDIA blog post feature, and the top two teams will also receive extended access to NVIDIA GPUs through Denvr Dataworks.
Challenge winners:
🥇 First Place Prize: jetix — GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs
Project: Simulating lithium-ion batteries on quantum computers
🥈 Second Place Prize: Heidelberg Quantum — GeForce RTX 4080 GPUs
Project: Parallel Optimal Amplitude Embedding: PQPIXL
🥉Third Place Prize: Lame_Test — GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs
Project: cuPhastLearn: Fast Phase-Transition Prediction with Quantum Machine Learning and Multi-GPU Acceleration
QHack Sponsors and Poster
Every year, we are filled with excitement seeing the quantum community grow and are grateful to be part of it — thanks to all who joined us for QHack 2024. This event would be nothing without all of you and the generous support of our sponsors.
As a memento, we’ve created a QHack 2024 poster for you. ❤️
Download it here.
Want to join our next event and be the first to learn about upcoming PennyLane certificates? Be sure to keep in touch ✉️
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That’s all for now!
Your pals at QHack 🙂
About the author
@larawatson
Lara is the Senior Marketing Lead at Xanadu. She is an experienced marketing and administrative professional that you may also find teaching a yoga class occasionally.