IBM Releases API to their Quantum Computing Cloud Service

IBM announced today the company would be updating their Quantum Experience cloud with a new API that the firm hopes will increase the abilities for developers, researchers, and scientists to construct more sophisticated apps using their experimental quantum computing system.

Last year, IBM opened their five-qubit computer in their New York labs to the public through a cloud service. The goal was to provide researchers a quantum computing model to help advance technological research, which is still in the early stages of development.

Last May, the company released a programming language to write programs for the system. Jerry Chow, the manager of the quantum computing group at IBM, says that it has worked fairly well so far with 40,000 users signing and resulting in 15 research papers.

But researchers have explained they would like to use the program in more advanced ways than what IBM initially released. As a result, IBM released their new API today on their IBM cloud platform. By having an API, programmers can write scripts in their programming language of their choice and test experiments with IBM’s quantum computing model. Moreover, according to IBM, this gives users the ability to build connections between IBM’s cloud quantum computer with traditional computers without having to know a lot about quantum physics.

The goal is to make it easier for higher end experimentation.

“The API allows programmers to test more theories and lay the groundwork to scale up these larger systems. What we really want to do is work with the community to figure out what quantum computing looks like in the future when we have a larger number of qubits,” Chow explained in a statement,

The company also announced they would be offering a computer simulator and a Software Development Kit to allow researchers to build applications for the system.

What can quantum computing do for you?

Essentially, quantum computers are a super calculator that can answer scientific questions in seconds, which would take a scientist years or a lifetime to figure out. By using atoms as a computer device, researchers can run an algorithm and determine all possible combinations at once.