A Brief Survey of Quantum Programming Languages

Abstract. This article is a brief and subjective survey of quantum programming language research. 1 Quantum Computation Quantum computing is a relatively young subject. It has its beginnings in 1982, when Paul Benioff and Richard Feynman independently pointed out that a quantum mechanical system can be used to perform computations [11, p.12]. Feynman’s interest in quantum computation was motivated by the fact that it is computationally very expensive to simulate quantum physical systems on classical computers. This is due to the fact that such simulation involves the manipulation is extremely large matrices (whose dimension is exponential in the size of the quantum system being simulated). Feynman conceived of quantum computers as a means of simulating nature much more efficiently. The evidence to this day is that quantum computers can indeed perform certain tasks more efficiently than classical computers. Perhaps the best-known example is Shor’s factoring algorithm, by which a qu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: FLOPS
• Authors: Peter Selinger
• Keywords: FLOPS 2004, Hardware