A lambda calculus for quantum computation | Hacker News Reader

A lambda calculus for quantum computation

het.brown.edu

114 pointsjessup10 comments

Very cool! The examples on this page are Scheme implementations of the Examples section of his 2003 paper[0] linked on the page. He goes over the derivation of the programs for these examples in more detail in the paper.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0307150.pdf

Interesting resource. Given that "no-cloning" [1] seems to be a fundamental property of quantum mechanics, I would expect any relevant programming language to enforce linear types i.e. "use exactly once" constraint.

[1]: https://quantiki.org/wiki/no-cloning-theorem

The linked paper says in the abstract:

The calculus turns out to be closely related to the linear lambda calculi used in the study of Linear Logic. We set up a computational model and an equational proof system for this calculus, and we argue that it is equivalent to the quantum Turing machine.

Yes, I was placing that statement in context.

A brief survey of quantum programming languages, http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1618

A functional quantum programming language, http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/251

A Quantum Lambda Calculus, http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3769

That survey was written over 10 years ago. The field of quantum computation has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Modern quantum programming languages like pyQuil [0], Qiskit [1], and Q# [2] are designed to address the progress of quantum computing; like the fact that we now have small devices with 10s of qubits.

[0]: http://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1]: https://www.qiskit.org/

[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-qr-intro?vi...

There is an abundance of tools for reasearchers now, each with specific purposes. Libraries such as libquantum have different uses to libraries such as qiskit.

Could you give me an example of different use cases for libquantum vs qiskit? Thanks.

That's awesome! Also D-Wave uses Common Lisp[0].

[0]: https://cjelupton.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/quantum-computing...

D-Wave doesn't have a quantum computer. They have a quantum annealer.

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