QuFlow: Visualizing Parameter Flow in Quantum Circuits for Understanding Quantum Computation

With the rapid progress of quantum computation recently, it attracts a substantial amount of people to learn quantum computation. Quantum computation differs a lot from classical computation. To help novices learn quantum computation, we conducted a interview with people who are learning quantum computation and found that novices feel confused about 1) how quantum gates contribute to the final results in a complicated quantum circuit and 2) how the final results generate steps along the quantum circuits. Thus, we present QuFlow, an interactive visualization tool for teaching the fundamentals of quantum computation. Users can use it to build a quantum circuit, then QuFlow will simulate the quantum circuit in a classical computer. After simulation, QuFlow will not only present the final output results of quantum circuits but also shows how the parameters change along the quantum circuits. A qualitative user study was carried out among target users, and the results suggested that QuFlow could be effective for learning quantum computation.