The BIG Quantum Hackathon by Québec Quantique and QuantX, the first of a kind competition, aimed to gather the whole value chain of Quantum Computing and demonstrate its ability to address real life challenges. During the event, the business world represented by industrial and financial companies, venture capital / private equity investors, and consulting groups joined forces with quantum computing specialists from academia, quantum hardware and software providers to approach a set of longstanding problems from different domains: chemistry, machine learning, optimization, numerical simulations, etc.
The event took place on June 20 to 23 at Centech, Montréal, and consists of a 2-day technical phase followed by a 2-day business phase. We investigated the real impact of their work, today’s viability of QC solutions, existing business interest, the priorities, and efforts to be done in the coming years.
My team worked on a use case computational challenge proposed by CMC Microsystems. Using an ensemble of atoms in the Pasqal quantum computer platform, we demonstrated that Connected Dominant Set (CDS) of a graph can be used to efficiently find water on Mars using a fleet of autonomous sensors.
We won the technical and business phases of the hackathan. The jupyter notebook for our code and the presentation slides for the technical and business phases are contained in this repo.