🔍 Hello! I am a creative image modification tool powered by quantum computing.

• Brush collection powered by quantum algorithms.
• Lightweight program which supports quantum simulation and hardware communication both.
• Work with high-res images with quantum backend to draw, modify and have fun!

👩🏻‍💻 Author: MOTH Quantum (This app is built with ❤️ by Astryd Park)

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📋 Contents

1. Usage Instruction
2. Installation Instruction
3. Examples
4. One more thing
5. Technical Stack

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Usage Instruction

This application is tested with MacOS Sequoia (15.5) && Eclipse IDE (2025-03) && Python 3.11+ && OpenJDK 21.0.7 LTS. Technically, the application must support every machines (Windows, Linux and MacOS) with the suitable Java and Python versions. It requires OpenJDK and Python to execute, so they must be previously installed.

However, Luckily, the installer provides automatic OpenJDK + Python installation through miniconda thus you actually don’t need to do anything! install.sh creates condo environment ’quantumbrush’ and store all necessary libraries there. More of this is described under Installation Instructions.

Quantum Brush is basically a graphics software powered by quantum-computing-imagination. There’s nothing which makes user experience difficult. The program has three windows. Treat them equally well.

1. Canvas

This is the place where your image/canvas is displayed and you interact with it by mouseClicked and mouseDragged. mouseClicked will create a yellow dot. mouseDragged will create a red line. Look at the screenshot above. Those elements are crucial for quantum algorithms, so treat it nicely.

⚠️ CAVEAT: Because of this special requirements, after you work on other windows, you MUST click the title bar of the canvas or it will wrongly leave yellow dots. This might make quantum brush algorithms to misbehave so be careful!

Now, what will you do if you want to do something with quantum brush algorithms? As a sidekick, there is a control panel.

2. Control panel

This window is for modifying parameters for quantum brush algorithms. It depends on which brush did you choose. For example, Heisenbrush (Ver.Continuous) here has a radius, lightness, saturation and strength. It also contains tiny descriptions of each brush.

After creating & modifying each brush stroke, we must group those paths and level them up to a system called 'stroke'. When you press 'Create', the program will say you can open up Stroke Manager to run the quantum algorithms. It depends on your choice. You can make bunch of strokes BEFORE you run them on quantum simulations/hardware (in the near future) OR you can directly open up the manager window and run the algorithms. This program is designed to not interfere with creative workflow.

Have you decided to move along to Stroke Manager?

3. Stroke Manager

   Open up Stroke Manager from Tools on the menu bar.

Here, you can see the list of ’strokes’ that you created. You can change the timeline of them, for example, run the recent stroke on the simulator than the old one.

When you click 'Run', Python process will run in the background. You can close the window and come back to actually apply the processed result on the divided section. If the result is satisfactory, press the 'Apply to Canvas' button.

Installation Instructions

These instructions are primarily for MacOS. They will likely also work for Linux.

1. Download the install script install.sh here.
2. Open up the terminal. On a Mac, to open the ’Terminal’ app, press command+Space, type terminal and press Enter.
3. Write sh ~/Downloads/install.sh (or copy-paste from here) and then press Enter to run the install script.
4. If the installer shows {someQuestion}? (Y/y), you can press y and Enter!
5. After it install the program, you can choose whether the installer will set up the environment for you or not. Just press y for peaceful mind.
6. The QuantumBrush folder can down be found in your Home folder.

To update you will need to run a similar process, but this time using the update.sh file in the QuantumBrush folder.

1. Open a terminal, as in step 2 above.
2. Write sh ~/QuantumBrush/update.sh (or copy-paste from here) and then press Enter to run the update script.

Examples

The combination of the stroke and the quantum brush that we choose, the result is this!

c.f. Image credit: Pavilion by the Lake You can see the tech-savvy details on our paper and understand deeply about quantum-powered creativity!

• Our paper is on Arxiv now! Check it out here.

One more thing...

Users can create their own quantum brush and contribute to this open-source project! The dummy brush looks like this (Have a look at the template folder underneath effect, too.:

QuantumBrush
	|_ effect
			|_ {brushName}
						|_ {brushName}.py
						|_ {brushName}.json
						|_ __init__.py

Any users who have brilliant idea regarding visual effects using quantum mechanics can fork this repository, include their own brush and raise a pull request. After the review, we will add your work with credit in the dist branch.

The current nature of quantum computing requires lot of dependencies. If it needs to be manually installed, look at the line 318 of setup.sh. You will notice there's an automatic block of script to install dependencies with conda run -n quantumbrush pip install. Don't forget to add yours here so that your work won't crash. Recommended workflow is A) Sketch your idea, B) Think about which technical stack is needed and C) Fork the repository, modify the setup.sh or jump right into development.

You can see all debugging results if you open up the View Live Debug Log underneath Tools in the Control Panel window.

1. __init__.py is just an empty file for existance.

2. {brushName}.py is a brush algorithm file. Make your run(...) function to be linked to the effects/apply_effect.py in the future.

3. {brushName}.json is a file contains initialised parameters for the brush. This is the example from template.json. It contains the default values for each parameter, data type of each and other metadata which is your name or a description. id is extra important because this will be used to communicate between each script.

   {
    "name": "Super cool effect",
    "id": "id_without_spaces", # Set this well so that it could be called from other scripts.
    "author": "creator", # Your name
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "description": "Small description of the effect.",
    "dependencies": {
        "numpy": ">=2.1.0"
    },
    "user_input": {
        "Radius": {
            "type": "int",
            "min": 0,
            "max": 100,
            "default": 20 
        },
        "Strength": {
            "type": "float",
            "min": 0.0,
            "max": 1.0,
            "default": 1.0
        },
        "Color": {
            "type": "color",
            "default": "#FF0000"
        }
    },
    "stroke_input": {
        "image_rgba": "array",
        "path": "array",
        "clicks": "array"
    },
    "flags": {
        "smooth_path": true
    }

While development, check apply_effect.py underneath the effect folder so that you can have a glimpse of how backend communicates. Happy quantum!

Technical Stack

• Format: Standalone Processing (Java) application for multiple OS

• Supported:

  ```
  (base) astrydpark@Astryds-MacBook-Pro ~ % java -version
      openjdk version "21.0.7" 2025-04-15 LTS
      OpenJDK Runtime Environment Temurin-21.0.7+6 (build 21.0.7+6-LTS)
      OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM Temurin-21.0.7+6 (build 21.0.7+6-LTS, mixed mode, sharing)
  ```
  

• Works on Python 3.11+ (Automatic background: Recent version of Miniconda environment called ‘quantumbrush')

Project location: $HOME/QuantumBrush

Used IDE version: Eclipse 2025-03