Towards A Theory Of Quantum Computability

International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 2005

Taking the view that computation is after all physical, we argue that physics, particularly quantum physics, could help extend the notion of computability. Here, we list the important and unique features of quantum mechanics and then outline a quantum mechanical "algorithm" for one of the insoluble problems of mathematics, the Hilbert's tenth and equivalently the Turing halting problem. The key element of this algorithm is the computability and measurability of both the values of physical observables and of the quantum-mechanical probability distributions for these values.

Applied Sciences

Contrary to the classical case, the relation between quantum programming languages and quantum Turing Machines (QTM) has not been fully investigated. In particular, there are features of QTMs that have not been exploited, a notable example being the intrinsic infinite nature of any quantum computation. In this paper, we propose a definition of QTM, which extends and unifies the notions of Deutsch and Bernstein & Vazirani. In particular, we allow both arbitrary quantum input, and meaningful superpositions of computations, where some of them are “terminated” with an “output”, while others are not. For some infinite computations an “output” is obtained as a limit of finite portions of the computation. We propose a natural and robust observation protocol for our QTMs, which does not modify the probability of the possible outcomes of the machines. Finally, we use QTMs to define a class of quantum computable functions—any such function is a mapping from a general quantum state to a probab...

ArXiv, 2018

We discuss computability of basic notions of quantum mechanics like states and observables in the sense of Type Two Effectivity (TTE). This is not done directly but via function realizability using topological domain theory as developed by Schroeder and Simpson. We relate the natural topologies induced by admissible representations to topologies considered in functional analysis and measure theory.

Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences

It is argued that underlying the Church–Turing hypothesis there is an implicit physical assertion. Here, this assertion is presented explicitly as a physical principle: ‘every finitely realizible physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means’. Classical physics and the universal Turing machine, because the former is continuous and the latter discrete, do not obey the principle, at least in the strong form above. A class of model computing machines that is the quantum generalization of the class of Turing machines is described, and it is shown that quantum theory and the 'universal quantum computer’ are compatible with the principle. Computing machines resembling the universal quantum computer could, in principle, be built and would have many remarkable properties not reproducible by any Turing machine. These do not include the computation of non-recursive functions, but they do include ‘quantum parallelism’, a method ...

Logic and Logical Philosophy, 2010

The aim of this paper is to present some basic notions of the theory of quantum computing and to compare them with the basic notions of the classical theory of computation. I am convinced, that the results of quantum computation theory (QCT) are not only interesting in themselves, but also should be taken into account in discussions concerning the nature of mathematical knowledge. The philosophical discussion will however be postponed to another paper. QCT seems not to be well-known among philosophers (at least not to the degree it deserves), so the aim of this paper is to provide the necessary technical preliminaries presented in a way accessible to the general philosophical audience.

International Journal of Quantum Information, 2016

Classical and quantum parallelism are deeply different, although it is sometimes claimed that quantum Turing machines are nothing but special examples of classical probabilistic machines. We introduce the concepts of deterministic state machine, classical probabilistic state machine and quantum state machine. On this basis, we discuss the question: To what extent can quantum state machines be simulated by classical probabilistic state machines? Each state machine is devoted to a single task determined by its program. Real computers, however, behave differently, being able to solve different kinds of problems. This capacity can be modeled, in the quantum case, by the mathematical notion of abstract quantum computing machine, whose different programs determine different quantum state machines. The computations of abstract quantum computing machines can be linguistically described by the formulas of a particular form of quantum logic, termed quantum computational logic.

Probing the Structure of Quantum Mechanics - Nonlinearity, Nonlocality, Computation and Axiomatics, 2002

Using the 'between quantum and classical' models that have been constructed explicitly within the hidden measurement approach of quantum mechanics we investigate the possibility to construct a 'between quantum and classical' computer. In this view, the pure quantum computer and the classical Turing machine can be seen as two special cases of our general computer. We have shown in earlier research that the intermediate 'between quantum and classical' systems cannot be described within standard quantum theory. We argue that the general categoral approach of state property systems might provide a unified framework for the study of these 'between quantum and classical' models, and hence also for the study of classical and quantum computers as special cases.

2009

We are witnesses nowadays in physics to an intense effort to built a quantum computer. In this essay, I point out that the failure of this enterprize could be in fact more intellectually exciting than its success. I conjecture that, despite the fact that we do not know any law of nature that would prevent us from building such a machine, it might not be possible, after all, to scale up the few qubits that have been realized so far. If this turns out to be the case, the consequences could be truly amazing: it would mean that quantum mechanics is indeed an incomplete description of reality, as Einstein thought, and it would also imply that certain types of computation and the knowledge derived from it are fundamentally inaccessible.

Theoretical Computer Science, 2008

Manin, Feynman, and Deutsch have viewed quantum computing as a kind of universal physical simulation procedure. Much of the writing about quantum logic circuits and quantum Turing machines has shown how these machines can simulate an arbitrary unitary transformation on a finite number of qubits. The problem of universality has been addressed most famously in a paper by Deutsch, and later by Bernstein and Vazirani as well as Kitaev and Solovay. The quantum logic circuit model, developed by Feynman and Deutsch, has been more prominent in the research literature than Deutsch's quantum Turing machines. Quantum Turing machines form a class closely related to deterministic and probabilistic Turing machines and one might hope to find a universal machine in this class. A universal machine is the basis of a notion of programmability. The extent to which universality has in fact been established by the pioneers in the field is examined and this key notion in theoretical computer science is scrutinised in quantum computing by distinguishing various connotations and concomitant results and problems.

arXiv preprint quant-ph/0404146, 2004

The driving force of research in quantum computation [7,10] is that of looking for the consequences of having information encoding, processing and communication make use of quantum physics, ie of the ultimate knowledge that we have, today, of the physical world, as ...