Non-deterministic quantum programming
Paolo Zuliani · 2004
In standard computation, non-determinism is used for specifying programs’ behaviour, without having to specify details of implementation. In quantum computation, non-determinism is either meant to be “classical” probabilism or it is not considered at all, since quantum computation is the physical theory of computation and thus it does not deal with non-implementable features. In this work we will instead show that non-determinism may be useful also in quantum computation. In particular, we consider non-determinism embedded in a programming language for quantum computation, the quantum Guarded-Command Language (qGCL), and use that for describing and reasoning about counterfactual computation and mixed-state systems.