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arXiv:2511.17264

Notes on Stack Machines and Quantum Stack Machines

Daowen Qiu

Published Nov 21, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Multi-stack machines and Turing machines can simulate to each other. In this note, we give a succinct definition of multi-stack machines, and from this definition it is clearly seen that pushdown automata and deterministic finite automata are special cases of multi-stack machines. Also, with this mode of definition, pushdown automata and deterministic pushdown automata are equivalent and recognize all context-free languages. In addition, we are motivated to formulate concise definitions of quantum pushdown automata and quantum stack machines.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2511.17264

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Multi-stack machines and Turing machines can simulate to each other. In this note, we give a succinct definition of multi-stack machines, and from this definition it is clearly seen that pushdown automata and deterministic finite automata are special cases of multi-stack machines. Also, with this mode of definition, pushdown automata and deterministic pushdown automata are equivalent and recognize all context-free languages. In addition, we are motivated to formulate concise definitions of quantum pushdown automata and quantum stack machines.
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Quantum finite automata, as well as quantum pushdown automata (QPA) were first introduced by C. Moore and J. P. Crutchfield. In this paper we introduce the notion of QPA in a non-equivalent way, including unitarity criteria, by using the definition of quantum finite automata of Kondacs and Watrous. It is established that the unitarity criteria of QPA are not equivalent to the corresponding unitarity criteria of quantum Turing machines. We show that QPA can recognize every regular language. Finally we present some simple languages recognized by QPA, not recognizable by deterministic pushdown automata.
In general, quantum computation models are expected to be more powerful than classical counterparts. However, sometimes this is not the case.It is known that there exists some regular language which one-way quantum finite automata and one-way quantum counter automata cannot recognize. This is due to the restriction of reversibility which quantum models must satisfy. Thus, it is an interesting question: what kinds of quantum models suffer from/overcome the restriction? To tackle this problem, we focus on (empty-stack acceptance) one-way quantum pushdown automata, and show that there exists a regular language which one-way quantum pushdown automata cannot recognize. This implies adding a stack to one-way finite automata cannot overcome the restriction of reversibility if we adopt empty-stack acceptance as the acceptance mode.
One important question for quantum computing is whether a computational gap exists between models that are allowed to use quantum effects and models that are not. Several types of quantum computation models have been proposed, including quantum finite automata and quantum pushdown automata (with a quantum pushdown stack). It has been shown that some quantum computation models are more powerful than their classical counterparts and others are not since quantum computation models are required to obey such restrictions as reversible state transitions. In this paper, we investigate the power of quantum pushdown automata whose stacks are assumed to be implemented as classical devices, and show that they are strictly more powerful than their classical counterparts under the perfect-soundness condition, where perfect-soundness means that an automaton never accepts a word that is not in the language. That is, we show that our model can simulate any probabilistic pushdown automata and also show that there is a non-context-free language which quantum pushdown automata with classical stack operations can recognize with perfect soundness.
This paper proposed a quantum analogue of classical queue automata by using the definition of the quantum Turing machine and quantum finite-state automata. However, quantum automata equipped with storage medium of a stack has been considered, but the concept of quantum queue automata has not been introduced so far. The classical Turing machines can be simulated by classical queue automata. Motivated by the efficiency of the quantum Turing machine and nature of classical queue automata, we have introduced the notion of quantum queue automata using unitary criteria. Our contributions are as follows. We have also introduced a generalization of real-time deterministic queue automata, the real-time quantum queue automata which work in real-time i.e. the input head can move towards the right direction only and takes exactly one step per input symbol. We have shown that real-time quantum queue automata is more superior than its real-time classical variants by using quantum transitions. We have proved the existence of the language that can be recognized by real-time quantum queue automata and cannot be recognized by real-time deterministic (reversible) queue automata. Further, we have shown that there is a language that can be recognized by real-time quantum queue automata but not by real-time non-deterministic queue automata.
Even though quantum computation is useful for solving certain problems, classical computation is more powerful in some cases. Thus, it is significant to compare the abilities of quantum computation and its classical counterpart, based on such a simple computation model as automata. In this paper we focus on the quantum pushdown automata which were defined by Golovkins in 2000, who showed that the class of languages recognized by quantum pushdown automata properly contains the class of languages recognized by finite automata. However, no one knows the entire relationship between the recognitive abilities of quantum and classical pushdown automata. As a part, we show a proposition that quantum pushdown automata can deterministically solve a certain problem that cannot be solved by any deterministic pushdown automata.