Can override the RNG in Cove's local simulation

I checked in a change to Cove's local simulation yesterday that allows for the random number generator to be overridden in classes derived from the quantum register. This was inspired by some discussions I've been having with Noon Silk. My intention for this is to allow users to swap out the random number generator if desired, not to give the simulation predictable behavior for testing and such.

Building on top of Cove

Noon Silk is building on top of Cove (my quantum computing framework). Specifically you should check out his "qutils" project here and his blog post about it here. For starters it can generate Cove code from qasm files, which is what I used to create the circuit diagrams in my dissertation.

Here's an example of an input:


Transformed to Cove as the output:


Nice to be this seeing done. At one point I had considered building a tool to allow you to create a circuit diagram in a GUI and generate code from it, but it was low on my list and something I never got around to doing. Nice to see this being done, I see it as an excellent tool- especially for students of quantum computer programming.

Changes to local simulation implementation of Cove

I've gone through and made some changes to the local simulation of Cove. (Cove is the framework for quantum computing I've developed.) Cove separates the what needs to be provided as interfaces from the how, which is provided by implementations to those interfaces. Currently I've supplied a prototype implementation which I refer to as the local simulation implementation. This simulates a quantum computer on the local PC. This is very much a prototype, with some methods not implemented and plenty of room to improve the efficiency of the simulation, the later which has never been a goal of mine.

The change I've made to the local simulation is that the methods are now virtual. I originally intended implementations to be swapped out from one another and not built on each other. So the change to virtual methods opens up a cleaner derived implementation. There may be other changes I make to further promote building implementations on top of each other. These changes were inspired by some discussions I've been having with Noon Silk.