QOSF Monthly Challenges

Repository containing monthly challenges in quantum computing.

Current Challenge

Link to Problem PDF: Challenge 01

Release date: November 2nd, 2020

Submission deadline (optional): November 23rd, 2020

How it Works

These challenges will help you hone your general quantum computing skills by tackling some problems.

We release a new question every month. These are open to everybody and you're welcome to try your hand at solving them either individually or as a team.

• You are free to use any framework that you like, and submit your solutions in any format. Just make sure they're easy to evaluate.

You're also welcome to contribute challenge questions! Open an issue on this repo and describe the question, we'll take a look at it!

Tentative Timeline

• We will try and release each challenge on the same date every month.
• You get a month's time to solve each question, but if you wish to have your solution reviewed please aim to submit your solution within the first 2 or 3 weeks.
• To avoid any confusion, please refrain from submitting solutions to old questions. You're welcome to try them out though!

Submission

• Please fork this repository and use that to work on your solutions to the challenges.
  • Follow the folder structure that you see here. For each challenge, create a directory in your repo called challenge-xx, where xx is the challenge number.
  • Under this directory, create a folder with your github username (all lowercase, separated-by-hyphens). Your solution goes into this directory.
• If you complete a challenge and want to "submit" your solution, raise a Pull Request (PR) from your repo to ours.
• If your solutions works, we'll merge it to our repo.
• The best ones will be given a shout-out! 😃
• Note that if you're working as a team, it is sufficient to submit just one PR.

Evaluation

• We want this to be a community driven project, so evaluation will be in the form of peer reviews.
• Please take some time to go through other solutions and provide your feedback! The only way this will work well is if we learn from each other.
• If you like a solution, please leave an emoji reaction (a positive one!) on the PR. We will probably use this to pick the best submissions.
• We will also send out a poll where you can pick your favorite submission. Please vote!

Communication

• Please join the Slack channel for the challenge, where you can ask any questions you might have: #monthly-challenges

Git FAQ

• We recommend you install the new GitHub CLI tool which is pretty cool.
• Forking: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/getting-started-with-github/fork-a-repo
  • Pro tip: If you're using the CLI we just told you about, you can do this without ever leaving the terminal! Run gh repo fork qosf/monthly-challenges. When asked if you want to clone the repository, hit n.
• Cloning (first time setup):
  • git clone htps://github.com/{{your-github-username}}/monthly-challenges.git
    • If you're using the CLI, just run gh repo clone {{your-github-username}}/monthly-challenges.
  • run git remote add upstream https://github.com/qosf/monthly-challenges.git. You DO NOT have to do this if you used the CLI to clone your repo (it does that automatically).
  • run git checkout main
• What to do before starting a new challenge:
  • Bring your fork on-par with our repo

      git fetch upstream
      git checkout main
      git merge main upstream/main
      git push
    

  • Create a branch to work on the new challenge
    • git branch -b {{branch name}}
• Work on the challenge (make sure your changes are all on the right branch).
• Periodically push your changes to your fork
  • git push -u origin {{branch name}} the first time you push. For subsequent pushes, just git push.
• Raising a Pull Request: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/collaborating-with-issues-and-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests

Any other questions? Try the GitHub documentation or ping us on Slack!