Quantum computation and quantum information

What Hacker News says

1. casey2Jun 2026
   Physics? Yes. Feynman Lectures On Physics and Computation. Landau & Lifshitz. If you like SICP you might like SICM. Nielsen & Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information then Faulkner's Modern Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Information

   General advice take a look at the references in works you've recently read and look for lower level topics that interest you, after repeating a few times you'll find your way to physics or chemistry and you can use the above as reference works. The best resource is the one you actually use. If https://www.youtube.com/learning works better for you then use it.

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2. hershkumarJan 2026
   1) Generally the two models of QC are the digital/circuit model (analogous to digital logic gates, with some caveats, such as reversibility of operations, no-cloning theorem), and analog computation (tuning the parameters of a continuous-time quantum system in your lab such that the system produces useful output)

   2) The physics/architecture/organization depends heavily on the type of computer being discussed. In classical computing, one "type" of computer has won the arms race. This is not yet the case for quantum computers, there are several different physical processes through which people are trying to generate computation, trapped ions, superconducting qubits, photonics, quantum dots, neutral atoms, etc.

   3) There are several ways that you can simulate quantum computation on classical hardware, perhaps the most common would be through something like IBM's Qiskit, where you can keep track of the degrees of freedom of the quantum computer throughout the computation, and apply quantum logic gates in circuits. Another, more complicated method, would be something like tensor network simulations, which are efficient classical simulators of a restricted subset of quantum states.

   4) In terms of research, one particularly interesting (although I'm biased by working in the field) application is quantum algorithms for nuclear/high energy physics. Classical methods (Lattice QCD) suffer from extreme computational drawbacks (factorial scaling in the number of quarks, NP-Hard Monte Carlo sign problems), and one potential way around this is using quantum computers to simulate nuclear systems instead of classical computers ("The best model of a cat is another cat, the best model of a quantum system is another quantum system")

   If you're interested in learning more about QC, I would highly recommend looking at Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information", it's essentially the standard primer on the world of quantum computation.

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3. godsmokescrackJan 2026
   Standard textbook: Isaac Chuang and Michael Nielsen, "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information"

   More mathy: A. Yu. Kitaev, A. H. Shen, M. N. Vyalyi, "Classical and Quantum Computation"

   A killer app: Peter Shor, "Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer"

   Some course notes: https://math.mit.edu/~shor/435-LN/

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4. danielamJan 2026
   The classic text is Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" [0]. Whatever else you choose to supplement this book with, it is worth having in your library.

   [0] https://a.co/d/aPsexRB

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5. he1senbergOct 2025
   A bit more technical but the absolute best book on quantum computing is "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" by Nielsen and Chuang. It’s also a pretty good introduction on quantum mechanics in general.
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6. grepLeighMar 2025
   I'd recommend starting with Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Isaac Chuang and Michael Nielsen ("Mike and Ike"). It's the text used in most intro courses.

   There's an "Intro to Quantum Mechanics" section that covers what's strictly necessary to understand quantum algorithms.

   For lectures, John Preskill's lectures from the Quantum Computation course at CalTech: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0ojjrEqIyPy-1RRD8cTD_lF1...

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