In this dissertation, we investigate the computational power of quantum Turing machines operating in bounded space. First, we consider space-bounds that are space-constructible and at least logarithmic in the input size. For such space-bounds, it is shown that quantum Turing machines and probabilistic Turing machines are equivalent in power in the unbounded-error setting, in the sense that each model may simulate the other with at most a constant factor increase in space. From this, it follows that any quantum Turing machine computation can be simulated deterministically with at most a quadratic increase in space, and can be simulated deterministically in time at most exponential in the space-bound. Several other facts regarding quantum complexity classes defined in terms of such space-bounds are also proved. Second, we consider the power of quantum Turing machines restricted to constant space. In this case, we first prove that quantum Turing machines having one-sided error and running in linear time are strictly more powerful than probabilistic Turing machines having either one-sided error or having two-sided bounded error and running in polynomial time. Second, we prove that exact (i.e., accepting with probability 0 or 1) constant-space quantum Turing machines upon which no restrictions on running time are placed can recognize languages that cannot be recognized by any bounded-error constant-space probabilistic Turing machine. ii Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to a number of people. First, I would like to thank my advisor Eric Bach for all that he has taught me, regarding both theoretical computer science and how to be a researcher in general. His advice and support are greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank Anne Condon for her great advice and for many helpful discussions during my years as a graduate student. This dissertation has benefitted greatly from comments and suggestions by Anne and Eric as well.
In this paper we study quantum computation from a complexity theoretic viewpoint. Our first result is the existence of an efficient universal quantum Turing machine in Deutsch's model of a quantum Turing machine (QTM) [Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. A, 400 (1985), pp. 97--117]. This construction is substantially more complicated than the corresponding construction for classical Turing machines (TMs); in fact, even simple primitives such as looping, branching, and composition are not straightforward in the context of quantum Turing machines. We establish how these familiar primitives can be implemented and introduce some new, purely quantum mechanical primitives, such as changing the computational basis and carrying out an arbitrary unitary transformation of polynomially bounded dimension. We also consider the precision to which the transition amplitudes of a quantum Turing machine need to be specified. We prove that
O(logT) bits of precision suffice to support a T step computation. This justifies the claim that the quantum Turing machine model should be regarded as a discrete model of computation and not an analog one. We give the first formal evidence that quantum Turing machines violate the modern (complexity theoretic) formulation of the Church--Turing thesis. We show the existence of a problem, relative to an oracle, that can be solved in polynomial time on a quantum Turing machine, but requires superpolynomial time on a bounded-error probabilistic Turing machine, and thus not in the class $\BPP$. The class $\BQP$ of languages that are efficiently decidable (with small error-probability) on a quantum Turing machine satisfies $\BPP \subseteq \BQP \subseteq \Ptime^{\SP}$. Therefore, there is no possibility of giving a mathematical proof that quantum Turing machines are more powerful than classical probabilistic Turing machines (in the unrelativized setting) unless there is a major breakthrough in complexity theory.
Quantum computing is a prolific research area, halfway between physics and computer science [27, 29, 52]. Most likely, its origins may be dated back to 70's, when some works on quantum information began to appear (see, e.g., [34, 37]). In early 80's, R.P. Feynman suggested that the computational power of quantum mechanical processes might be beyond that of traditional computation models [25]. Almost at the same time, P. Benioff already proved that such processes are at least as powerful as Turing machines [9]. In 1985, D. Deutsch [22] proposed the notion of a quantum Turing machine as a physically realizable model for a quantum computer. From the point of view of structural complexity, E. Bernstein and U. Vazirani introduced in [20] the class BQP of problems solvable in polynomial time on quantum Turing machines, focusing attention on relations with the corresponding deterministic and probabilistic classes P and BPP, respectively. Several works in the literature explored classical issues in complexity theory from the quantum paradigm perspective (see, e.g., [7, 60, 61]).
As was well known, in classical computation, Turing machines, circuits, multi-stack machines, and multi-counter machines are equivalent, that is, they can simulate each other in polynomial time. In quantum computation, Yao [11] first proved that for any quantum Turing machines
M, there exists quantum Boolean circuit
(n,t)-simulating
M, where
n denotes the length of input strings, and
t is the number of move steps before machine stopping. However, the simulations of quantum Turing machines by quantum multi-stack machines and quantum multi-counter machines have not been considered, and quantum multi-stack machines have not been established, either. Though quantum counter machines were dealt with by Kravtsev [6] and Yamasaki {\it et al.} [10], in which the machines count with
0,±1 only, we sense that it is difficult to simulate quantum Turing machines in terms of this fashion of quantum computing devices, and we therefore prove that the quantum multi-counter machines allowed to count with
0,±1,±2,...,±n for some
n>1 can efficiently simulate quantum Turing machines. Therefore, our mail goals are to establish quantum multi-stack machines and quantum multi-counter machines with counts
0,±1,±2,...,±n and
n>1, and particularly to simulate quantum Turing machines by these quantum computing devices.
In this thesis, we introduce a new quantum Turing machine (QTM) model that supports general quantum operators, together with its pushdown, counter, and finite automaton variants, and examine the computational power of classical and quantum machines using small space bounds in many different cases. The main contributions are summarized below. Firstly, we consider QTMs in the unbounded error setting: (i) in some cases of sublogarithmic space bounds, the class of languages recognized by QTMs is shown to be strictly larger than that of classical ones; (ii) in constant space bounds, the same result can still be obtained for restricted QTMs; (iii) the complete characterization of the class of languages recognized by realtime constant space nondeterministic QTMs is given. Secondly, we consider constant space-bounded QTMs in the bounded error setting: (i) we introduce a new type of quantum and probabilistic finite automata (QFAs and PFAs, respectively,) with a special two-way input head which is not allowed to be stationary or move to the left but has the capability to reset itself to its starting position; (ii) the computational power of this type of quantum machine is shown to be superior to that of the probabilistic machine; (iii) based on these models, two-way PFAs and two-way classical-head QFAs are shown to be more succinct than two-way nondeterministic finite automata and their one-way variants; (iv) we also introduce PFAs and QFAs with postselection with their bounded error language classes, and give many characterizations of them. Thirdly, the computational power of realtime QFAs augmented with a write-only memory is investigated by showing many simulation results for different kinds of counter automata. Finally, some lower bounds of realtime classical Turing machines in order to recognize a nonregular language are shown to be tight.