Three years after launching the first publicly available quantum computer over the cloud, IBM is introducing a number of enhancements to the IBM Q Experience quantum cloud services and software platform.

The public beta of a new experience lets current and new users make circuits and application-building tools. These services further accelerate the movement of research and development on IBM Q systems toward practical applications. In addition, simplified access to the open-source Qiskit quantum computing software framework will help IBM Q Experience’s developer community take full advantage of IBM Q systems.

Since launching on May 4, 2016, users have run more than 10 million quantum experiments on IBM Q Experience, and there have been more than 180,000 Qiskit downloads. Members of IBM'squantum community have already published 190 third-party papers exploring new computing algorithms in chemistry, machine learning, and more, as well as approaches to fundamental science.

The IBM Q Experience beta offers its community the opportunity to write and execute code to run on real quantum hardware and graphically compose and optimize quantum circuits, the sets of instructions given to a quantum computer. Users can work with circuits to develop algorithms, save and share experiments, and access quantum computing resources from a single browser.

IBM is now providing an improved fully integrated quantum circuit composer. The new Circuit Composer feature lets developers build more complex quantum circuits than ever before to run on a variety of simulators and IBM Q physical quantum systems. Visualization tools show changes in the simulated quantum states of the qubits as developers compose their circuits. Those who program with the text editor can watch their circuits change graphically in real time.

Shortly after launching IBM Q Experience, IBM started building Qiskit as an open-source framework to enable an even larger number of ways to program quantum – from circuits to algorithms. The revamped IBM Q Experience beta now gives the quantum developer community a way to work with Qiskit in the cloud using Jupyter Notebooks directly within a single environment, which help organize experiments and work in one place. No separate installs. No additional code to write. Just open up Qiskit notebooks and start writing your quantum programs wherever you are.

IBM expects that the the effects of quantum computing to reach beyond the research lab over the next few years.