Foundations of Quantum Programming (Extended Abstract)

Wei-Lun Tsai, Yu‐Fang Chen, Ondřej Lengál

Abstract Hoare-style verification provides a principled foundation for reasoning about the correctness of quantum programs, but existing approaches do not allow fully automatic verification. While automata-based verification scales well when specifications are given directly as automata, prior frameworks incur exponential blow-up when translating high-level set-based assertions into automata, which severely limits practicality. We introduce an extended set-based specification language and a specification-to-automata translation algorithm whose complexity is linear in the number of qubits, enabled by controlled automaton construction and qubit reordering. The resulting compact automata enable fully automatic Hoare-style verification of fixed-qubit quantum programs at previously infeasible scales, while substantially improving expressiveness without compromising efficiency.

Armin Nikkhah Shirazi

This extended abstract was submitted to the "Foundations 2020: The 20th UK and European Conference on Foundations of Physics"

Shota Arakaki, Masao Hirokawa

As quantum computing hardware advances toward practical implementation, the design of high-level programming languages for quantum-classical hybrid systems remains a critical challenge. Current quantum programming approaches lack unified abstractions that seamlessly integrate classical and quantum computation. This paper proposes a foundational framework for a high-level quantum-classical hybrid programming language based on multi-modal type theory. Our approach formulates quantum-classical hybrid computation as staged computation, where classical computation generates and executes quantum programs. We adapt type systems and operational semantics from prior research in classical staged computation to this framework. This research provides a theoretical foundation for implementing interpreters and compilers that uniformly handle both classical and quantum computation.

Mingsheng Ying, Yuan Feng, Runyao Duan +2 more