For the fourth year in a row, PennyLane is participating in unitaryHACK, an annual virtual event by the Unitary Fund, in which hackers have the opportunity to win cash bounties by making contributions to the open-source quantum ecosystem.
How to compete
Submit your pull requests for the five PennyLane unitaryHACK bounties until June 12th and become a PennyLane contributor!
PennyLane is an open-source library with a close relationship to the quantum software community — and we welcome every opportunity that lets us grow together. If you've been using PennyLane for a little while and are wondering how you might take that next step or even give back to the community by contributing to PennyLane, this could be the perfect opportunity for you.
We have selected five features that you can work on in the next two weeks — some are simpler, some a bit more complicated, but they're all valuable and we can't wait to include your contributions in PennyLane.
Tackle one of our five quantum programming challenges, learn about open-source software development, and become a PennyLane contributor:
-
Improve operator support for the new
assert_equal
function, which checks the equality of operators, measurements, and tapes – for two different sets of classes (this addition will be split into 2 bounties) — 2 × US$75 -
Improve measurement support in the
from_qasm
function, which allows for the conversion of a QASM string into a PennyLane quantum function — US$100 -
Support native measurement-based snapshots in
default.clifford
, the PennyLane device for the fast simulation of Clifford circuits — US$125 -
Add a
QutritChannel
operation as the qutrit analogue to theQubitChannel
operation, which allows noise to be specified via a collection of 3×3-dimensional Kraus operators — US$125
The bounties are available for submissions made until June 12th, and you can find all the details on the unitaryHACK website. Register, contribute to PennyLane and win our bounties!
Remember that you can contribute to PennyLane at any time by following the PennyLane development guide or picking one of our good first issues to solve — but contributions made to solve these five challenges until June 12th will be eligible to win PennyLane cash bounties as part of unitaryHACK 2024.
Last year we welcomed some fantastic PennyLane contributions at unitaryHACK 2023, which enabled support for trace distance, qutrit basis state preparation, a unified decomposition transform, and more. In fact, one of last year's bounty winners has shared some advice for first-time contributors based on his own experience, and we hope this can encourage you.
Whether you've already done this a hundred times or you've never contributed before, there's a lot to learn (and win!) here. Check out the rules, pick your favorite PennyLane bounty and submit a pull request to claim a bounty. If you're not sure where to start, we can recommend the unitaryHACK Hacker Guide, which has some great resources to help you, and our team will also be there to support you on the PennyLane Discussion Forum.
We're excited to see your contributions and continue to build PennyLane together! 💕
About the author
Ivana Kurečić
🐢 Focused on the adoption and implementation of innovative technologies