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Comment by cevi

1 day ago

For learning the theory behind quantum computing, I usually recommend Watrous's lecture notes [1] - they start out by immediately giving a helpful analogy to ordinary probabilistic computation.

The online tutorial [2] is a good followup, especially if you want to understand Clifford gates / stabilizer states, which are important for quantum error correction.

If you have a more theoretical bent, you may enjoy learning about the ZX-calculus [3] - I found this useful for understanding how measurement-based quantum computing is supposed to work.

[1] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf [2] https://qubit.guide/ [3] https://zxcalculus.com/

Thanks for the pointers.

hershkumar pointed to Watrous' book so the notes you point to might be a good introduction to the book itself.

I didn't know of "ZX-calculus" so that goes from my unknown-unknowns to known-unknowns and so there a bunch of reading to be done there too.