Microsoft's Quantum team and Codeforces are excited to invite you to Microsoft Q# Coding Contest — Summer 2020! The contest will run from June 19 to June 22.

As a reminder, last weekend we held a warmup round with easier tasks on the topics that have not been covered in the previous contests. You can find the problems from the warmup round for practice here, and the described solutions here. There is also a list of great learning and practice resources here.

Several useful reminders:

• The contest is unrated :-)
• Solutions are accepted only in Q#.
• The tasks are grouped by topic, and the tasks within one topic are ordered in approximate order of increasing difficulty. If you find a problem too hard, check the next problems in this topic and problems from different topics, they might turn out to be easier for you.
• Custom Invocation allows you to run Q# code on Codeforces servers; make sure your code has namespace Solution and an operation with a signature operation RunQsharp () : Bool defined in it.
• And the really important stuff: the top 50 ranked participants will receive a Microsoft Quantum T-shirt, and 25 random participants who solved at least one problem but didn't finish in the top 50 will also receive a Microsoft Quantum T-shirt! Here is a preview (we haven't printed the T-shirts yet, so the final look in print might differ slightly):

Microsoft's Quantum team is excited to announce the Q# Coding Contest – Summer 2020, the third in the series of Q# contests! In this contest you can put your quantum programming skills to the test, solving quantum computing tasks in Q#. The winners (as well as some lucky participants) will receive a Microsoft Quantum T-shirt!

Quantum computing is a radically different computing paradigm compared to classical computing. Indeed, it is so different that some tasks that are believed to be classically intractable (such as factoring integers or simulating physical systems) can be performed efficiently on a quantum computer. In December 2017 Microsoft introduced the Quantum Development Kit which includes the Q# programming language.

In summer of 2018 we hosted the first quantum programming contest, which included problems on introductory topics in quantum computing: superposition, measurement, quantum oracles and simple algorithms. In winter of 2019 we hosted the second quantum programming contest, which offered harder problems on those topics plus some tasks on implementing unitary transformations. This contest will introduce new types of tasks, as well as some twists on the previous ones.

The contest will run from June 19 to June 22. As usual, we will hold a warmup round the weekend before the contest, from June 12 to June 15, to give you an opportunity to get familiar with the contest environment and submission system before the main contest. Participation in the warmup round is optional.

Good luck! We hope you enjoy the contest!

The rules of the contest are: