How to caculate the inner product of two vectors with Q#

Question

For example, if $a$ is a row vector, $b$ is a column vector, how to use Q# to calculate the inner product of these two? Which method or operator can be used? Just $a*b$? Any others? Really need your help. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Q# doesn't have data types to represent row or column vectors, so they'd be represented as just arrays.

You can write a straightforward for loop to iterate through the vectors and accumulate the products of elements $\sum_{i=0}^{n-1}a_ib_i$:

mutable prod = 0;
for i in 0 .. Length(a) - 1 {
    set prod += a[i] * b[i];
}

Alternatively, you can calculate their inner product using library functions:

1. Zip the arrays a and b together so that they become an array of tuples: Zipped(a, b).
2. Do pairwise multiplication for each tuple in the result: Mapped(TimesI, Zipped(a, b)).
3. Add up pairwise products: Fold(PlusI, 0, Mapped(TimesI, Zipped(a, b))).

With the next release you'll also be able to combine the last two steps in one using lambda expressions: Fold((sum, (ai, bi)) -> sum + ai * bi, 0, Zipped(a, b)).

Answer 2

The inner product of two vector (of equal length, of course), is simply given by the sum of the products of the coordinates with same index.

In general, if you have two vectors a and b, then the inner product u⋅v is given by ∑a⋅b.

This is the only way I know, hope it helps.