Hello everyone and welcome to this class on Quantum mechanics and quantum
computation. My name is Umesh Wazirani and I am a professor at the University of
California at Berkeley. Here at Berkeley, we are very excited to be part of this
revolution in education. Bringing cutting edge courses to anyone in any part of the
world. So what is quantum computation? Quantum computation is a very young field
which is based on the discovery that quantum systems can be exponentially
powerful. I will say a lot more about this in subsequent videos but in this video I
want to talk about the format of the course. The course is offered over eight
weeks followed by a final exam. The material will be presented through a
series of short videos which will be augmented with inline quizzes to help you
reenforce your understanding of the material. There'll be seven problem sets.
Each worth ten percent of the score. And the problems that we will have
mainly multiple choice and questions with numeric answer which you will turn in. To
make sure that you can, you understand your, you know, the material well, we will
allow you to make multiple attempts at the, at the problem sets. And after the
first two attempts you will be penalized ten percent for every subsequent attempt.
If you want to understand the material at greater depth, we'll also include optional
long questions. Um, these you do not have to turn in. But, you're welcome to discuss
these with your fellow students in online forums which I'll talk about later. The
final 30 percent of your score will be based on the final exam, which is, um,
which you can think of as a particularly long problem set. Okay, so what's the
required background for this course? So this course has been carefully designed to
make it accessible to students from a multiple of backgrounds, including
computer science, physics, chemistry, mathematics, etcetera. And so we've tried
to minimize the number of requirements for this course. So in particular I'll not
assume any prior knowledge of quantum mechanics. [sound] But to take this
course, you will need to have a thorough understanding of basic linear algebra.
What I mean by that is, simple concepts such as vectors and matrices, orthogonal
basis inner products I values and I vectors. To help you review your knowledge
of this material, we, we will, we will include some sort of supplementary
material and, and perhaps a video about this, about this subject. I'll also assume
very basic knowledge of computer science. Things such as the big [inaudible] um, or
some elementary algorithms. But particularly how you analyze the running
time of algorithms by counting the number of steps. There are few other important
issues we should go through.This class has an honor code. This is the same kind of
honor code we have for our in class students here in Berkeley. So you are
allowed to discuss the material in this course, in fact, you are encouraged to
discuss the material in this course with your fellow students. You can even
discuss the problem sets, with your fellow students, you know to ask
clarifying questions, etcetera. But the answers that you turn in, have to be your
own. In addition, we'll request that you not uh, distribute online, the problem
sets or any of the answers uh, that we post. Uh, this is so that um, in
subsequent offerings of this course, the students are allowed to work independently
on these questions. I'll be posting course notes um, every week. You should think of
this as a text book for the class. This brings us to the question of time
management. So you should expect to spend anywhere from five to twelve or more hours per
week on this course, depending, of course, on the kind of background you bring to
this, to this course and also the depth to which you want to understand the material.
So the material is going to be formulated so that you can understand it either at a
high level or if you want to you can use this material as a [inaudible] walk to
understanding. The various aspects of this material at a greater depth. The course
notes will help you to do this. As per the optional problem sets. There is one other
important point which is that there is an online discussion forum for this class
which will allow you to interact with your fellow students. This is a very important
part of the class. This will make it more fun for you but it will also allow
you to understand the material at a greater depth. We also encourage to form
study groups either physically or through this online forum. Okay so what will you
learn in this class. So as I mentioned one of the key aspects of Quantum computation
is the exponential power of quantum systems. So in this course you learn, what
is the source of the spa. And how can you use this source, how can you exploit this
power to design quantum algorithms. By the end of this course you will, you will
understand several iconic quantum algorithms, including the quantum
algorithm for factoring integers efficiently. You will also learn what are
the limitations of the power of quantum mechanics, in order to do all this. You
have to have an understanding of the basic, um, of basic quantum mechanics. And
so another way to view this course is as a simple and conceptual introduction to the
basic elements of quantum mechanics. Okay, so I look forward to see having you in
this course.