Interaction Techniques for User-friendly Interfaces for Gate-based Quantum Computing

Abstract: Quantum computers offer promising approaches to various fields. To use current noisy quantum computers, developers need to examine the compilation of a logical circuit, the status of available hardware, and noises in results. As those tasks are less common in classical computing, quantum developers may not be familiar with performing them. Therefore, easier and more intuitive interfaces are necessary to make quantum computers more approachable. While existing notebook-based toolkits like Qiskit offer application programming interfaces and visualization techniques, it is still difficult to navigate the vast space of quantum program design and hardware status. Inspired by human-computer interaction (HCI) work in data science and visualization, our work introduces four user interaction techniques that can augment existing notebook-based toolkits for gate-based quantum computing: (1) a circuit writer that lets users provide high-level information about a circuit and generates a code snippet to build it; (2) a machine explorer that provides detailed properties and configurations of a hardware with a code to load selected information; (3) a circuit viewer that allows for comparing logical circuit, compiled circuit, and hardware configurations; and (4) a visualization for adjusting measurement outcomes with hardware error rates.