Quantum Pushdown Automata

Daowen Qiu

Masaki Nakanishi

Yumiko Murakami, Masaki Nakanishi, Shigeru Yamashita +1 more

Marats Golovkins

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.

Yumiko Murakami, Masaki Nakanishi, Shigeru Yamashita +1 more

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.