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Electronics

Quantum Representation for Deterministic Push-Down Automata

Varun Puram, K. M. George, Johnson P. Thomas

Published Nov 18, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract There are many papers presenting quantum computing models. The definitions parallel the classical definitions of finite state automata, push down automata, context-free grammars etc. Classical computing model definitions define languages precisely. We can state that a string belongs to a language or does not belong to it with no room for error. Quantum definitions do not possess this certainty. Sacrificing the certainty and adopting a quantum definition of a computing model does not appear to provide any concrete power to the model. Therefore, the path of this paper is to begin from the classical definition and end in a quantum circuit. In this paper we start from a Deterministic Push-Down Automaton (DPDA). We present circuit for state transition and stack operations. The circuits presented can be viewed as independent algorithms. As an example, the approach used to construct the circuit for state transition can be utilized to build the circuit for a function presented as a Boolean matrix.

DOI
10.3390/electronics13224531

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Abstract There are many papers presenting quantum computing models. The definitions parallel the classical definitions of finite state automata, push down automata, context-free grammars etc. Classical computing model definitions define languages precisely. We can state that a string belongs to a language or does not belong to it with no room for error. Quantum definitions do not possess this certainty. Sacrificing the certainty and adopting a quantum definition of a computing model does not appear to provide any concrete power to the model. Therefore, the path of this paper is to begin from the classical definition and end in a quantum circuit. In this paper we start from a Deterministic Push-Down Automaton (DPDA). We present circuit for state transition and stack operations. The circuits presented can be viewed as independent algorithms. As an example, the approach used to construct the circuit for state transition can be utilized to build the circuit for a function presented as a Boolean matrix.
There are several papers that define quantum finite automaton analogous to classical finite automaton. Some papers describe the power of quantum automaton. In general, in quantum automata unitary matrices are associated to input symbols. Even though quantum circuits (or unitary matrices) are shown in specific cases, there is no general method given to construct a circuit or unitary matrix is found in the literature. This research focuses on construction of unitary matrices for each input symbol from the classical definition of a Deterministic Finite State Machine (DFSM). An algorithm is developed to associate a quantum circuit to an input symbol which considered as a mapping of classical DFSM states. IBM quantum composer is used to design circuits and build examples.
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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.
To study quantum computation, Moore and Crutchfield (Theoret. Comput. Sci. vol. 237, pp. 275-306, 2000) proposed quantum versions of finite-state and push-down automata, as well as regular and context-free grammars. In this note, we show that the languages generated by regular quantum grammars are equivalent to the languages generated by regular grammars. Therefore, from the perspective of generating languages, regular quantum grammars are not more powerful than classical regular grammars. This implies that it may be necessary to look for more well-formed definitions of quantum grammars and maybe those of quantum automata.
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.