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Getting Started

What you need

  1. Access to a Quokka — you have two options:
    • Own a Quokka puck? Use the iOS app to connect to your puck and load circuits.
    • Don't have one? Sign up at quokkacomputing.com to access a Google Colab notebook ("Quokka Start Here") that connects to one of six cloud Quokkas. No hardware needed.
  2. This project — for the circuit notes and explanations.

Set up

Option A: Quokka Cloud (recommended for most people)

  1. Go to quokkacomputing.com/get-started and sign up
  2. Click through to the "Quokka Start Here" Colab notebook — it walks you through your first quantum program (a "quantum coin" on one qubit)
  3. The notebook sends QASM programs to a cloud Quokka and returns the results

There are six cloud Quokkas available:

  • quokka1.quokkacomputing.com through quokka6.quokkacomputing.com

They may occasionally go offline due to power or network conditions — if one is down, try another.

Option B: Clone the repo locally

git clone https://github.com/johnazariah/quantum
cd quantum

Browse the Circuit Bench notes, read the explanations, and copy the .qasm code into your Quokka Colab notebook or iOS app when you're ready to run.

Run your first circuit note

The Quokka "Start Here" notebook introduces you to QASM with a simple one-qubit "quantum coin" program. If words like gate, basis, or measurement still feel slippery, read Circuit Bench 00: Reading a Quantum Circuit before moving on.

Once you're comfortable with that, try something more interesting.

Open circuit-bench/01-bell-state/bell.qasm — you'll see:

OPENQASM 2.0;
include "qelib1.inc";

qreg q[2];
creg c[2];

h q[0];
cx q[0], q[1];

measure q[0] -> c[0];
measure q[1] -> c[1];

Paste this into a code cell in your Quokka Colab notebook (or load it via the iOS app if you have a puck). Run it. You should see outcomes 00 and 11 with roughly equal probability; in an ideal noiseless run, 01 and 10 are absent.

Congratulations, you just created an entangled pair of qubits. Now read the full Circuit Bench note to understand why.

How circuit notes are organized

circuit-bench/01-bell-state/
├── README.md        # The explanation — what, why, and how
├── bell.qasm        # The circuit — paste into Quokka
└── expected.txt     # What the output should look like
  • Read the README for the full story
  • Run the .qasm file on your Quokka
  • Check expected.txt to verify your results

What's OpenQASM 2.0?

OpenQASM 2.0 is a simple, standard language for describing quantum circuits. Think of it as assembly language for quantum computers. It looks like this:

h q[0];          // put qubit 0 in superposition
cx q[0], q[1];   // entangle qubit 0 and qubit 1
measure q -> c;  // measure and store results

It's human-readable, platform-independent, and every quantum computing tool understands it. What you learn here works everywhere.

Next steps