Author Archives: Harald Haugli

It was much more fun to program this on my old HP calculator (not necessarily an optimal solution, but I wrote this around 40 years ago, my very first version…): LBL “HANOI” “N?” PROMPT STO 01 “A” ASTO 02 “B” ASTO 03 “C” ASTO 04 10 STO 00 XEQ “INFIX” STOP LBL “INFIX” 1 RCL … Continue reading »

The Tower of Hanoi is something I “have to” do on any calculator I encounter, but using Python feels almost like cheating, it is just too easy. Unfortunately there is little else of interest for this task on this calculator. def hanoi(n,a,b,c): if n==1: print(a,” >> “,b) else: hanoi(n-1,a,c,b) hanoi(1,a,b,c) hanoi(n-1,c,b,a) hanoi(3,1,2,3) To fit it … Continue reading »

Here you can see the program running: The numbers can of course be complex, so let us try a different input:

Believe it or not, even with their strict limitations, the fairly simplistic functions from the last post are sufficient building blocks to demonstrate a simple quantum circuit. Now we just have to declare the necessary quantum gates and initialize the three input qubits and we are ready to actually “build” the circuit. This is the … Continue reading »

We will need a few functions to do necessary mathematical operations on qubits (or more specifically on the state vector or probability vector of a quantum system). Note that I follow what I believe is the most common numbering of inputs with qubit 0 being the first input from above in the circuit and the … Continue reading »

Making quantum circuits in Python is trivial I hear you say, there are already several packages for this, like Qiskit. Nah, you did not think a calculator had a package manager now, did you? The calculator only has a few standard packages as well as a couple of TI specific ones. We will need “random” … Continue reading »

This is not useful. The only reason I would want to do it is because it is not so straightforward (awkward is maybe the right word) on a calculator. In my book that makes it fun. For us masochistic nerds. No-one in their right mind would want to waste their time on this. The circuit … Continue reading »

Regardless how “modern” the TI-84 graphing calculator is, the software you are supposted to use to connect it to a PC (for backup and transfer of files) has not been updated for around 2 years and it plain does not work on Windows 11 on any of my machines. Yes, I have tried all their … Continue reading »

From the highschool days I always used a Texas Instruments calculator. Until I switched to Hewlett-Packard. For fun I recently bought a new (sort of) TI calculator. Do I have any use for it? No. But it was on sale and it’s interesting to test a modern (sort of) graphing calculator. More information about the … Continue reading »

I am in the process of updating and adding more walks to my Symi page.