The Unitary Fund is currently holding unitaryHACK, a multi-week hackathon and IonQ is sponsoring four bounties. The event started last week and runs through June 17th, which means it isn’t too late to get involved!
unitaryHACK is not your typical hackathon. Instead of getting people together for a short weekend of building demos of new products and tools that are likely to never be seen again, this hackathon encourages participants to contribute to existing open-source projects by sponsoring cash bounties for specific problems pre-selected by the projects’ maintainers. These come in many flavors, from documentation, testing, and tooling support to more-complex implementations of quantum chemistry or quantum machine learning techniques.
The event is being put on by Unitary Fund, a non-profit organization devoted to supporting and expanding the open source quantum ecosystem. The Unitary Fund encourages open-source participation by providing microgrants for quantum development, maintaining several of their own open-source projects like Mitiq and Metriq, running a community discord, and sponsoring community events like the annual unitaryHACK.
IonQ is a member and supporter of UnitaryFund, and so has provided bounties for making improvements to Qiskit-IonQ, our open source SDK that allows users to run Qiskit circuits on IonQ’s trapped ion quantum hardware. One cash bounty, to demonstrate submission of multiple circuits in parallel, has already been claimed. But three more remain available as of the afternoon of Friday, June 10th.
Our largest bounty is still outstanding, and it’s reserved for a contribution that integrates the custom gates exposed as part of our new native gateset interface with Qiskit’s extensive compilation and optimization toolchain, allowing Qiskitters to more-easy take advantage of certain Qiskit tools like some in Qiskit Nature that would currently require a manual transpilation step The hackathon will continue until June 17th. Whether you are a student, a hobbyist, or a quantum professional, you can still register now and start looking for bounties that you can tackle, and you can find the IonQ team in the Unitary Fund discord for help in shaping your submissions.