Suggestions for Lab 1

[dr-kinder]

I found the function requirements difficult to interpret in Part 2 of this lab. The callback_dict is referenced in the cost_func function, but it was not explained or defined until after the cost_func function was graded.

One might reasonably argue that I should have read the whole notebook first, rather than struggling through one cell at a time. However, I would suggest moving the following text immediately before the "Exercise 6" box:

Callback functions are a standard way for users to obtain additional information about the status of an iterative algorithm (such as VQE). However, it is possible to do much more than this. Here, we use a mutable object (dictionary), to store resulting vector at each iteration of our algorithm, in case we need to restart the routine due to failure or return the another iteration number.

callback_dict = {
"prev_vector": None,
"iters": 0,
"cost_history": [],
}