The Quantum Bottleneck — Companion Notebooks

Eight industry problems. Eight quantum algorithms. Eight runnable notebooks.

These are the companion notebooks for The Quantum Bottleneck: Real Problems and their Quantum Solutions — a book that teaches quantum computing application-first, starting from real industry problems rather than qubits.

Each notebook implements (or illustrates) the algorithm from its corresponding book chapter. Some are faithful worked examples; others are toy demonstrations where that is the honest way to show the idea at runnable scale.

Pedagogy note

The code is intentionally explicit. We keep circuit construction, API calls, and measurement post-processing visible so you can inspect the mechanism end to end. A polished library would abstract more of this away — but that would make the teaching worse.

The notebooks

#	Unit	What you'll build	Blog post
1	Logistics	QAOA variational loop for MaxCut on a small graph	The $50M Delivery Route
2	Cryptography	Compiled period-finding toy for N = 15	The Trapdoor
3	Drug Discovery	Single-geometry VQE anatomy for H₂	The $2B Molecule
4	Machine Learning	Quantum vs. classical kernel SVM	The Feature Explosion
5	Finance	Classical pricing + toy amplitude estimation	The Convergence Wall
6	Supply Chains	Nurse scheduling QUBO micro-example	The Scheduling Nightmare
7	Materials Science	Hubbard benchmark and toy QPE	The Materials Maze
8	Climate & Energy	Embedding pipeline illustration for catalyst screening	The Catalyst Bottleneck

Running locally

cd bottleneck
pip install -r requirements.txt
jupyter lab notebooks/

About the book

The Quantum Bottleneck follows a zoom-in/zoom-out rhythm for each unit: industry hook → mathematical bottleneck → quantum algorithm → worked example → reality check. The full manuscript is being prepared for publication. These notebooks are the runnable companions — and the blog posts above are self-contained introductions to each problem.