Wrapping up unitaryHACK 2023!

Thanks to all that took part in unitaryHACK 2023; Unitary Fund’s distributed hackathon supporting existing projects in the quantum open source ecosystem.

Whether you were a onlooker, maintainer, bounty hacker, or community member: Thank you, it was a blast, and Unitary Fund’s largest event to date 💛🌴.

Winners & Stats

Over 700 participants joined unitaryHACK 2023 from over 80 countries (!!) with a strong representation of India (30%) and the USA (18%). Of these, 72 hackers claimed 99 bounties, with more than $11k awarded.

[A considerable bump in participation from 2022 that saw about 400 participants, 63 hacks and 27 hackers.]

Gregory Varghese, aka WingCode completed 10 bounties, with Davide Gessa, aka dakk following up with 9 bounties. A full leaderboard of hacks is available here. In the kick-off and wrap-up party on Unitary Fund’s Discord, over 70 enthusiasts joined the celebrations.

This year 33 projects were featured, with the help of 45 maintainers!

Amazon Braket SDK, Bloqade, BQSKit, Covalent, Dora Factory Quantum Experiments, Error Correction Zoo, Graphix, HierarQcal, KQCircuits, lambeq, Metriq, Mitiq, OpenQAOA, pauliopt, PennyLane, Perceval, Pulser, PyClifford, PyQ, qBraid-SDK, QECFT book, Qiskit, Qiskit Aer, Qiskit Braket Provider, qrack, QuNetSim, QuTiP, scqubits, Symmer, Toqito, TorchQuantum, Yao, ZX Live.

These projects span a variety of languages such as Python, Julia, Rust, C++, and Jupyter Notebooks. Project topics span from open hardware and diagnostics (KQCircuits, scqubits) to measurement based quantum computing (Graphix), from quantum error correction (Error Correction Zoo, QECFT book) to compilers (BQSKit, Mitiq), to quantum machine learning (HierarQcal, TorchQuantum, PennyLane, lambeq), from efficient quantum circuit simulators (qrack, Symmer, PyClifford, pauliopt) to analog quantum computing simulators (Bloqade, Pulser) to full-stack SDKs (Qiskit, Amazon Braket SDK, Yao), from projects orchestration and APIs (Covalent, Qiskit Braket Provider) to quantum information and nonlocal games (Toqito), from quantum network simulations (QuNetSim) to open quantum systems (QuTiP).

Of the hackers, 70% thought the challenges were just the right difficulty, with the remaining 30% saying they were too hard. 44% of hackers said they will continue to contribute to the projects they hacked on during this event, and an additional 41% of hackers said they would like to continue making contributions if they have time. An estimated 60% of hackers were making their first contributions to QOSS for this event, with many of them contributing to open source for the first time! Congratulations to all for making such awesome contributions, it’s really been wonderful to see!

Thanks so much to all the unitaryHACK supporters: AWS, Classiq, and the Unitary Fund members — Core Members: IBM Quantum and Scientifica; Supporting Members: Agnostiq, AWS, Cisco, DoraHacks, Pasqal, Quandela, Qyber. Thank you all! 🙏Hope to see you next year, or even sooner on our community discord.