A Practical Quantum Instruction Set Architecture

11 Aug 2016  ·  Robert S. Smith, Michael J. Curtis, William J. Zeng ·

We introduce an abstract machine architecture for classical/quantum computations---including compilation---along with a quantum instruction language called Quil for explicitly writing these computations. With this formalism, we discuss concrete implementations of the machine and non-trivial algorithms targeting them. The introduction of this machine dovetails with ongoing development of quantum computing technology, and makes possible portable descriptions of recent classical/quantum algorithms.

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