Testing and More Testing

Last week, I wrote about how I was working to make my code create matrix representations of arbitrary gates. This week was a little bit slower and mostly involved writing tests to ensure that my code was really working.

There were a few minor changes that I ended up having to make so that everything would work for arbitrary 3-qbit gates. To check my sanity, I followed through an example in "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" by Nielsen and Chuang and saw if my results matched theirs. This example had a set of single and 2-qbit gates that formed a quantum Fourier transform on a three qbit system, they also showed the matrix that would represent this transformation. Thus, this was a good way to make sure everything in my apply and represent functions was consistent with the text. After realizing that I was reading the circuit diagram upside down and backwards, I was able to confirm that my code produced the same results as the book. I repeated this for a few other select examples and came to a similar conclusion.

All in all, I am making good progress towards simulating a quantum computer.