Optimal control lectures at the Numerical Methods in Quantum Information Science Summer School at the Mount Ida campus of University of Massachusetts Amherst August 12th (Mon) - 18th (Sun) 2024.
These notebooks owe a great deal of credit to Zac Manchester's CMU 745: Optimal Control & Reinforcement Learning---the code is open source and the lectures are available on YouTube.
Shout out to the organizers of Qnumerics for making this event possible!
Install Julia Juliaup is an installer and version manager. This is one useful way to manage Julia versions and keep up with the latest changes. After installing, run julia to obtain the Julia REPL.
Julia environments (Documentation) Your project's environment is stored in Project.toml. You can interactively add packages to an environment by using the Julia command line REPL and package manager.
To start Julia in the project folder, type julia --project=.. Alternatively, start julia, then type ] to enter the package manager. Type activate . to activate or create an environment specified by Project.toml located in the current folder.
Separately, you generate a manifest (solving the versions to create a valid environment) by running instantiate; instantiate will check that the environment is correct after you add all the packages you want.
Our environment
These notebooks are configured with a Project.toml containing everything you need, so you should be able to run them with this environemnt.
# Standard packages
using LinearAlgebra
using CairoMakie
# Our package
using PiccoloDeveloping If you are interested in developing with the source code, and want to use these notebooks as a starting point, that's great! We will show you how to do that now. First, uninstall Piccolo from the project.
We want to go straight to the source from now on--the git repositories are at the Kestrel Quantum Github page. There are three packages inside [Piccolo] (QuantumCollocation, NamedTrajetories, TrajectoryIndexingUtils). Most likely, you want to work on QuantumCollocation. Clone, then add the local packages to the Project file with e.g. dev ../relative/path/to/repo/QuantumCollocation. This command installs a version pointing to the local code instead of the package repository. Do the same for any others you would like to work with, or just stop at QuantumCollocation. Now, you can call:
using QuantumCollocationRevise.jl will let you edit source code and reload the changes in a notebook---automatically and without resetting the kernel! This is a great tool for development. add Revise from the REPL (within the current environment) and then include it before any packages you intend to edit:
using Revise
using QuantumCollocationJulia extension You can run Julia notebooks and much more with the Julia extension. Upon opening your project folder in VS code and attempting to run an .ipynb, you will see that VS Code finds the interpreters managed by juliaup and defaults to using the environment based on the Project.toml in the project directory.
Fonts VS Code will not display all characters allowed by Julia. You can change the editor font family in the settings to 'JuliaMono' to get full support. If you don't want to mix and mash, you can create a new VS Code settings profile for working in Julia at File>Preferences>Profile.
Tests (TestItemRunner.jl) Tests should automatically populate in VS Code when working with a Piccolo package. For example, just by adding the QuantumCollocation.jl folder to your workspace, you should see tests appear if you click on the Testing sidebar icon. If you run one of these tests, a new Julia kernel is spawned for the test. You can find the kernel if you click on the Julia sidebar icon (after installing the Julia extensions). Sometimes, for the tests to recognize new changes that Revise doesn't fix, you may need to manually kill this kernel to see your changes reflected.