IBM Quantum Challenge Africa 2021: An overview

IBM and it’s Qiskit team organized the IBM Quantum Challenge Africa 2021 from 9th September to 20th September to bolster the interest in Quantum Computing in the African continent. Although the challenge was specifically crafted for Africa, participants from around the world were allowed to take part in it.

The participants were exposed to three challenges that addressed problems faced by Africa in the fields of agriculture, finance and medicine. The task in hand was to explore Quantum Computing through IBM’s Quantum Computing library called Qiskit and find innovative solutions to these three challenge statements.

Here’s a brief summary of all three challenges one by one :-

A) Lab1 — Introduction and the Crop-Yield Problem 🌾

This lab introduced challengers to the wonderful and newly added module of Qiskit called Qiskit Optimization, along with two classical-quantum hybrid algorithms called VQE(Variational Quantum Eigensolvers) and QAOA(Quantum Approximate Optimization Problem).

The problem statement presents a scenario where there’s a farmland of 3 hectares and 4 crops. The objective is to come up with a crop distribution strategy that maximized the crop yield.

The lab guides the participants to first formulate a Quadratic Program that captures the relationship between 2 different crops and the constraints in distribution such as the total farmland available and the total amount of area that a single crop can occupy. Then using either VQE or QAOA they have to find the optimal solution which maximizes this quadratic function.

The solution isthen compared to a classically obtained value for a sanity check.

B) Lab2 — Quantum Speedups in Finance 💰

In this lab the participants are introduced to Qiskit Finance along with certain financial concepts such as a category of financial instruments known as derivatives. The derivatives themselves have different categories, but in this challenge a derivative known as ‘Option’ is considered which is defined by contracts that give the buyer of the option the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a specific underlying asset at an agreed-upon price sometime in the future.

The objective of this challenge is to find the fair price of an option using a Quantum version of Monte Carlo simulation that utilizes an algorithm known as Amplitude Estimation. This leads to a theoretical quadratic speedup in doing the computations.

What’s more interesting in this challenge is the vast amount of resources provided in it in the form of links to arXiv papers and blog posts. This one’s gonna take a good amount of time to get the whole feel of the challenge😉.

C) Lab3 — Quantum Chemistry for HIV 💊

This is the final lab of the challenge and perhaps the most interesting and novel one!

The objective of this lab is to leverage the power of Quantum Computing to find a drug to fight of HIV. More specifically, the task is to find whether a given toy anti-retroviral molecule can block off a toy protease molecule in order to inhibit viral duplication.

A protease can be considered as a scissor that cut’s a virus’ genetic material to create more virus. An anti-retroviral can be thought of as an obstacle that doesn’t let this scissor to cut anything. This can only happen if the anti-retroviral molecule is capable of binding with a protease molecule.

Therefore the task is to find the energy landscape of the anti-retroviral and protease system by varying the distance of approach between the two molecules and then determine whether the anti-retroviral is really capable of binding or not.

This lab introduced the participants to modules of Qiskit Nature that helps to encode the geometry of a molecule in a specific format, calculate its electronic configuration, convert it into a parametrized Quantum state, calculate it’s hamiltonian and then find the ground state of the hamiltonian. There’s opportunity to learn many more things in this lab than what has been written here, but that I leave it to you to explore for yourself.

End Notes -

This challenge was absolutely amazing and I got to learn about the real world use cases of Quantum Computing. I apologize if I got any of the above summary inaccurate in any sense. I’ll try to improve the article once I go through the challenges a couple more times.

Till then head over to the challenge page here and have fun solving the labs. Happy Quantum Computing!😊