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EEUM professor improves quantum programming techniques

José Nuno Oliveira, researcher coordinator of the High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) of INESC TEC and professor at the Department of Informatics of the School of Engineering of the University of Minho, is together with Ana Neri (INESC TEC) and in collaboration with Rui Barbosa, Staff Researcher at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL), developing research in the area of quantum programming, which proposes the concept of quantamorphism, a recursive combinator of quantum circuits that enriches quantum programming techniques.

Given the difficulty in testing quantum programs, the approach focuses on deriving quantum circuits correctly from their specification (through quantamorphisms), short-circuiting debugging. In this sense, the main objective of the study is to build correct-by-construction quantum circuits that, once compiled, can “run” on devices like those made available by the IBM Quantum Experience initiative.

“In this work, the laws of the classical algebra of programming are extended to quantum programming, showing that the formal strategies used to ensure reliability in classical programming can be tuned to quantum programming”, explained José Nuno Oliveira, professor at the School of Engineering of the University of Minho.

“Concerning possible applications, a formal analogy between quantamorphisms and recurrent neural networks suggests that the former may possibly be applied in machine learning in the future”, he added.

This work, whose toolchain is available here, was developed within the scope of the scientific paper “Compiling Quantamorphisms for the IBM Q Experience”, published by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, a Q1 level journal in software engineering, acknowledged as top in this area of knowledge.~

The professor mentioned in this news is associated with INESC TEC and UMinho.

Photo credits: IBM Q Experience

Source: BIP INESC TEC