Dublin student wins top prize at European Young Scientists awards

What an achievement. Fair play to him.

The winner of this year's BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition has taken home the top prize at 2019's European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) in Bulgaria. Adam Kelly from Skerries took home the big prize for his project on Optimising The Simulation of General Quantum Circuits. Ah yes. The quantum circuits. Something we understand very well. Four winners were chosen on the day, with Kelly joining people from Germany, America and Denmark at the top of the pile. The winners receive a healthy €7000 each for the four outstanding projects. Nice. More information on Kelly's project can be found here, thanks to the official EUCYS website: "Quantum computers may tackle problems beyond the capabilities of current computers. However, only small scale quantum devices are currently available. This introduces a need for fast and accurate simulation methods and tools. "In this work, a series of tools for simulating quantum computers are developed. Existing techniques are built upon, and new algorithms are developed. A classical pre-processing step is introduced, allowing for optimizations throughout the simulation process. "These developments create a coherent approach towards the simulation of quantum circuits, that can be used by any researcher to improve the simulation process for any quantum circuit, allowing more qubits, more quantum gates and faster development times." Yep. Like we said. We completely understood ALL of that.