Quantum computational logic

Stanley Gudder

Su‐Shing Chen

Recently, quantum computers have been proposed as potentially the next-generation computer systems which will overcome the physical and computational limitations of current solid state technology. This paper suggests that the natural logic of quantum computers should be the probabilistic logic rather than the ordinary logic. In probabilistic logic, computational problems formulated directly may be solved with much less complexities by quantum computers.

Vladimir L. Vasyukov

One of the logical proposals that arise from quantum computation is the idea to use the quantum theoretical formalism to represent parallel reasoning. To this aim a quantum computation is considered by means of convenient unitary operators assuming arguments and values in particular sets of qubit systems. Isolating some important unitary operators that have a special role in quantum computation (logical gates or quregisters) we obtain an opportunity to yield the language of Quantum Computational Logic (QCL) (cf. [Cattaneo et al., 2003; Cattaneo et al., 2004; Dalla Chiara et al., 2004]). The basic concept of the semantics of this language is the notion of quantum computational realization such that the meaning associated to any sentence is a quregister. Unlike the semantic of a standard quantum logic QCL-conjunction and QCL-disjunction do not correspond to lattice operations since they are not generally idempotent. Moreover, in QCL the weak distributivity principle breaks down and both the excluded middle and the non contradiction principles are violated. Finally, the axiomatizability of QCL is still an open problem. In the paper an axiomatization of QCL is proposed construing it as a kind of so-called Goldblatt’s binary logic. Some metalogical theorems (paraconsistency and completeness) are proved.

Antonio Ledda, Giuseppe Sergioli

Mingsheng Ying

The (meta)logic underlying classical theory of computation is Boolean (two-valued) logic. Quantum logic was proposed by Birkhoff and von Neumann as a logic of quantum mechanics more than sixty years ago. The major difference between Boolean logic and quantum logic is that the latter does not enjoy distributivity in general. The rapid development of quantum computation in recent years stimulates us to establish a theory of computation based on quantum logic. The present paper is the first step toward such a new theory and it focuses on the simplest models of computation, namely finite automata. It is found that the universal validity of many properties of automata depend heavily upon the distributivity of the underlying logic. This indicates that these properties does not universally hold in the realm of quantum logic. On the other hand, we show that a local validity of them can be recovered by imposing a certain commutativity to the (atomic) statements about the automata under consideration. This reveals an essential difference between the classical theory of computation and the computation theory based on quantum logic.

María Luisa Dalla Chiara, Roberto Giuntini, Roberto Leporini +1 more