Background: Quantum computing is a rapidly growing new programming paradigm that brings significant changes to the design and implementation of algorithms. Understanding quantum algorithms requires knowledge of physics and mathematics, which can be challenging for software developers. Aims: In this work, we provide a first analysis of how LLMs can support developers’ understanding of quantum code. Method: We empirically analyse and compare the quality of explanations provided by three widely adopted LLMs (Gpt3.5, Llama2, and Tinyllama) using two different human-written prompt styles for seven state-of-the-art quantum algorithms. We also analyse how consistent LLM explanations are over multiple rounds and how LLMs can improve existing descriptions of quantum algorithms. Results: Llama2 provides the highest quality explanations from scratch, while Gpt3.5 emerged as the LLM best suited to improve existing explanations. In addition, we show that adding a small amount of context to the prompt significantly improves the quality of explanations. Finally, we observe how explanations are qualitatively and syntactically consistent over multiple rounds. Conclusions: This work highlights promising results, and opens challenges for future research in the field of LLMs for quantum code explanation. Future work includes refining the methods through prompt optimisation and parsing of quantum code explanations, as well as carrying out a systematic assessment of the quality of explanations.

Machine learning based surrogate models offer researchers powerful tools for accelerating simulation-based workflows. However, as standard datasets in this space often cover small classes of physical behavior, it can be difficult to evaluate the efficacy of new approaches. To address this gap, we introduce the Well: a large-scale collection of datasets containing numerical simulations of a wide variety of spatiotemporal physical systems. The Well draws from domain experts and numerical software developers to provide 15TB of data across 16 datasets covering diverse domains such as biological systems, fluid dynamics, acoustic scattering, as well as magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of extra-galactic fluids or supernova explosions. These datasets can be used individually or as part of a broader benchmark suite. To facilitate usage of the Well, we provide a unified PyTorch interface for training and evaluating models. We demonstrate the function of this library by introducing example baselines that highlight the new challenges posed by the complex dynamics of the Well. The code and data is available at https://github.com/PolymathicAI/the_well.

There is an inherent lack of knowledge and technology to test a quantum program properly. In this paper, building on the definition of syntactically equivalent quantum gates, we describe our efforts in developing a tool, coined QMutPy, leveraging the well-known open-source mutation tool MutPy. We further discuss the design and implementation of QMutPy, and the usage of a novel set of mutation operators that generate mutants for qubit measurements and gates. To evaluate QMutPy’s performance, we conducted a preliminary study on 11 real quantum programs written in the IBM’s Qiskit library. QMutPy has proven to be an effective quantum mutation tool, providing insight into the current state of quantum tests. QMutPy is publicly available at https://github.com/danielfobooss/mutpy. Tool demo: https://youtu.be/fC4tOY5trqc.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is a technology that enables the management and distribution of infrastructure through code instead of manual processes. In 2020, Palo Alto Network’s Unit 42 announced the discovery of over 199K vulnerable IaC templates through their “Cloud Threat” Report. This report highlights the importance of tools to prevent vulnerabilities from reaching production. Unfortunately, we observed through a comprehensive study that a security linter for IaC scripts is not reliable yet—high false positive rates. Our approach to tackling this problem was to leverage community expertise to improve the precision of this tool. More precisely, we interviewed professional developers to collect their feedback on the root causes of imprecision of the state-of-the-art security linter for Puppet. From that feedback, we developed a linter adjusting 7 rules of an existing linter ruleset and adding 3 new rules. We conducted a new study with 131 practitioners, which helped us improve the tool’s precision significantly and achieve a final precision of . An important takeaway from this paper is that obtaining professional feedback is fundamental to improving the rules’ precision and extending the rulesets, which is critical for the usefulness and adoption of lightweight tools, such as IaC security linters.