Reply To: Challenge 10B
@AES_of_spades Certainly the programs you refer to are hugely impressive. However, as you imply, they are not easy to follow!!
My best advice would be to concentrate on writing programs which are clearly structured and self-documenting; this is especially important when working together with others in a group. I am sure most experienced programmers will have been faced with looking back on a program which they had written a while ago, trying to fathom out how on earth it works!
The days are gone when, faced with a few kilobytes of memory, programs had to be squeezed into the small amount of space available.
This is quite right of course, but it is still a fascinating challenge to try to boil the algorithm down to its barest bones. Another very interesting issue is that to properly understand how quantum computers operate it is necessary to go further and to reduce an algorithm to its structure in terms of logic gates. Each of the classical gates has a quantum counterpart and converting an algorithm (like Shor’s algorithm) to quantum form more or less consists of replacing the classical AND/OR/NOT gates with QAND, QOR, QNOT. To do that you need to understand how arithmetic operations are encoded on a chip. So for example you probably need to understand how a 2-bit adder works to add 2 digit binary numbers using (classical) logic gates. The connection with the compressed algorithms you are all (impressively) delivering here, is that quantum gates are very hard and expensive to build and assemble, and compressed algorithms could be cheaper to convert, so while properly documented, human readable code is a very good idea for classical computers, high efficiency algorithms which reduce the complexity of the circuits needed to run them still have a place! Harry