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Comment by sheepscreek | Hacker News Reader

To my naive mind, this model seems strongly aligned to how Quantum computers work. A QC can simultaneously perform operations on all possible states, which makes them exponentially faster. But working with them might as well be like working with alien tech. Weird sounding gates, superposition of states, it’s all hard to wrap one’s head around. Counter intuitive to everything we know in the macro world.

This model feels a lot less alien and could provide a much better starting point for programming on them. I can envision a compiler that will take an interaction net as input and spit out a quantum circuit.

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Thanks for your reply :)

It makes me want to learn more about quantum computing.

The foundational paper about interaction nets is published in 1990. (https://github.com/cicada-lang/inet/blob/master/docs/referen...) There must be some interesting developments during these 30 more years, maybe some of the developments are related to quantum computing ~

I am also somewhat naive minded, although I implemented this language, I actually only read the first 1990 paper about interaction nets, there are many follow up papers by the original author Lafont, some papers are about combinators, some papers are about linear logic and proof theory background of inet.

I will keep learning.

I think of classical computers operating on yes and no, and quantum computers operating on direction and magnitude. Things like Q# make it a lot more approachable, but I'm also very much a naive mind. That said, I'm not seeing the overlap between quantum computing and interaction nets. I'd think parallel-focused hardware like GPU's and eventually optical would be more natural hardware targets.

to have a model for quantum computing you will need to be able to define individual Qunatum Gates operating on qubit (like Hadamard gate https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/37080/trying-to-under... ) in order to implement algo like Shor's algorithm for (quantum-sped-up) prime-factoring in polylogarithmic time.

i.e. the quantum "simultaneity" only works via doing linear transformation across the probability amplitudes.

Will be interesting to see how interaction net can be extended (if possible at all?) to fit into the linear algebra of QM

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