Learning track

The learning track is a short, ordered path from “what is a Quon program?” to “recover a secret with a quantum oracle.” Each lesson is one small .qn program under samples/learning/ that you can read, compile, and edit without opening the language specification. The pages below teach the same material in prose, in order.

The track is deliberately Quon-native. It does not teach a circuit-building API the way a Python framework would. It teaches quantum computing through the lens of Quon’s two load-bearing ideas: a circuit is a typed value (Circuit<n, m, d, C>), and a qubit is a linear value that is consumed exactly once. Those two ideas — not a matrix library — are what let the compiler catch width mismatches, depth overruns, cloned qubits, and leaked ancillae before a single gate runs.

How to run the lessons

Build the compiler once from the repository root:

cargo build --release -p quonc

Then compile any lesson to OpenQASM 3:

./target/release/quonc samples/learning/hello_quon.qn --emit-qasm

Every lesson compiles to a flat QASM program you can sample on any simulator. Two lessons ship a Python checker that runs the compiled program on Qiskit Aer and asserts the statistics.

The six lessons

1 · Hello, Quon

The smallest complete program: a typed circuit value, the Quantum Monad, and measurement. Read the Circuit<2, 2, 2, Clifford> type before the gates.

2 · States & measurement

Computational basis versus superposition, and the Born rule — checked on Aer. Why measure consumes a qubit and hands back a copyable Bit.

3 · Gates & composition

Sequential |> (depth adds) versus a parallel layer (depth = max). Depth as a verified type-level bound, not an after-the-fact count.

4 · Linearity & ancilla

Why a qubit cannot be copied, what an ancilla owes you, and how the linear type system turns no-cloning into a compile-time fact.

5 · Entanglement

A Bell pair and a separable pair measured in one shot — correlation versus independence made visible in the histogram.

6 · Oracles & algorithms

The phase-kickback oracle seed that recovers a one-bit secret in a single query — the on-ramp to the textbook algorithm pack.

Read them in order. Each lesson links to the next, and the last hands off to the algorithm samples and the cookbook.

Where this sits in the docs

This track is the beginner on-ramp. For the formal language concepts once you finish it, read the Language guide — it covers the same ground (circuits, linearity, parallel composition, depth, measurement, borrow) at reference depth. The cookbook then walks complete end-to-end programs that the CI verifies on Aer.

→ Start with Lesson 1: Hello, Quon.