Classical Concepts in Quantum Programming

One perspective on quantum algorithms is that they are classical algorithms having access to a special kind of memory with exotic properties. This perspective suggests that, even in the case of quantum algorithms, the control flow notions of sequencing, conditionals, loops, and recursion are entirely classical. There is however, another notion of control flow, that is itself quantum. The notion of quantum conditional expression is reasonably well-understood: the execution of ...

Programming for today's quantum computers is making significant strides toward modern workflows compatible with high performance computing (HPC), but fundamental challenges still remain in the integration of these vastly different technologies. Quantum computing (QC) programming languages share some common ground, as well as their emerging runtimes and algorithmic modalities. In this short paper, we explore avenues of refinement for the quantum processing unit (QPU) in the co...

The computing ecosystem has always had deep impacts on society and technology and profoundly changed our lives in myriads of ways. Despite decades of impressive Moore's Law performance scaling and other growth in the computing ecosystem there are nonetheless still important potential applications of computing that remain out of reach of current or foreseeable conventional computer systems. Specifically, there are computational applications whose complexity scales super-linear...

The field of quantum algorithms is vibrant. Still, there is currently a lack of programming languages for describing quantum computation on a practical scale, i.e., not just at the level of toy problems. We address this issue by introducing Quipper, a scalable, expressive, functional, higher-order quantum programming language. Quipper has been used to program a diverse set of non-trivial quantum algorithms, and can generate quantum gate representations using trillions of gate...

The primordial model of quantum computation was introduced over thirty years ago and the first quantum algorithms have appeared for over twenty years. Yet the exact architectures for quantum computer seem foreign to an undergraduate student major in computer science or engineering, even though the mass media has helped popularize the terminologies in the past decade. Despite being a cutting-edge technology from both the theoretical and the experimental perspectives, quantum c...

In this work we introduce Qumin, a novel quantum programming language with a focus on providing an easy to use, minimalist, high-level, and easily extensible platform for quantum programming. Qumin's design concentrates on encompassing the various interactions between classical and quantum computation via the use of two sublanguages: an untyped one that handles classical preparation and control, and one linearly typed that explicitly handles quantum routines. This allows the ...

We introduce a novel scheme of quantum recursive programming, in which large unitary transformations, i.e. quantum gates, can be recursively defined using quantum case statements, which are quantum counterparts of conditionals and case statements extensively used in classical programming. A simple programming language for supporting this kind of quantum recursion is defined, and its semantics is formally described. A series of examples are presented to show that some quantum ...

The theory of quantum computation is presented in a self contained way from a computer science perspective. The basics of classical computation and quantum mechanics is reviewed. The circuit model of quantum computation is presented in detail. Throughout there is an emphasis on the physical as well as the abstract aspects of computation and the interplay between them. This report is presented as a Master's thesis at the department of Computer Science and Engineering at G{\"...

Quantum computing, albeit readily available as hardware or emulated on the cloud, is still far from being available in general regarding complex programming paradigms and learning curves. This vision paper introduces $Classi|Q\rangle$, a translation framework idea to bridge Classical and Quantum Computing by translating high-level programming languages, e.g., Python or C++, into a low-level language, e.g., Quantum Assembly. Our idea paper serves as a blueprint for ongoing eff...

Quantum computing (QC) represents the future of computing systems, but the tools for reasoning about the quantum model of computation, in which the laws obeyed are those on the quantum mechanical scale, are still a mix of linear algebra and Dirac notation; two subjects more suitable for physicists, rather than computer scientists and software engineers. On this ground, we believe it is possible to provide a more intuitive approach to thinking and writing about quantum computi...