Just to give you an idea, I've spent about 30-45 minutes reading over various materials (the Github links). I think my level of knowledge would be equivalent of understanding how dup, drop, and rot work in FORTH (or car and cdr in Lisp)... Basic element manipulation (bit/qubit, stack, and list).
The difference though, is that I only needed to understand there was a container of multiple items in FORTH and Lisp. For basic element manipulation, I needed to understand matrices.
At this rate, it would take hours before I understand how to write a basic program. And my trailblazer sense is already tingling (that I should let others be pioneers).
Normally I'd just resume lurker mode at this point, but my interest in combinatorics is driving my curiosity towards understanding what might be possible.
I admit it is an unusually larger leap to get to anything useful. We have been blessed to have such a fantastic and intuitive understanding of classical computing. We can pick up most new programming languages gradually and efficiently. When the fundamental object of manipulation is this wacky thing called a "state vector in 2^n dimensional Hilbert space" as opposed to "a bag of bits", and operations must be reversible, and ... and ... and ..., things are just harder.
I hope we (both Rigetti and the quantum computing community at large) can continue to refine and simplify the concepts at hand.
The difference though, is that I only needed to understand there was a container of multiple items in FORTH and Lisp. For basic element manipulation, I needed to understand matrices.
At this rate, it would take hours before I understand how to write a basic program. And my trailblazer sense is already tingling (that I should let others be pioneers).
Normally I'd just resume lurker mode at this point, but my interest in combinatorics is driving my curiosity towards understanding what might be possible.