FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Quipper Is a Language To Program the Nearing Quantum Computing Future

We're circled back to the beginning of computing, which means creating everything again. NBD.
Five qubit quantum circuit. Image: Martinis Group/UCSB

We like to talk about universality and portability in computer science. Alan Turing gave us his Turing Machine and, with it, the concept of Turing completeness. A complete programming language is capable of computing everything that is computable. What an amazing and bizarre idea that is, but completeness is something we happen to be able to prove (!).

Though he was very well versed in quantum mechanics, Turing didn't seem to catch on to the classical physics limitations of his machine. Though you couldn't blame him: The quantum computing alternative is that weird, a realm where the very notion of information is unlike what was once assumed to be an unwavering polarity between true and false. True and false is just logic or logical reasoning, and it's ancient. Computers with transistors smaller than viruses still deal with true and false via gates and circuits that process and arrange all of those trues and falses into meaning. Computation.

Advertisement

Quantum mechanics allows something different, which are states of trues and falses together, squished into probabilistic arrangements of cohabiting ones and zeros. This is so fundamentally different and counter-intuitive that it still seems impossible.

But it is possible, or it seems to be. What does this mean for programming languages, the very things that we use to interface with our machines?

This is the question approached by Benoît Valiron, a researcher at Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique, and a small group of computer scientists in this month's Communications of the ACM via a paper titled "Programming the Quantum Future."

It describes an entire quantum computer architecture, along with a quantum programming language dubbed Quipper, which is a bit beyond this post, but the authors were kind enough to offer a useful video introduction (above). It manages to pack quite a bit in.

In any case, I'll try to go deeper on Quipper later this weekend—I'm still reading the paper!—but, in the meantime, consider yourself primed.