Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer

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Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer (1985)

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by David Deutsch

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846 - 2 self

BibTeX

@MISC{Deutsch85quantumtheory,,
    author = {David Deutsch},
    title = {Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer},
    year = {1985}
}

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Abstract

It is argued that underlying the Church-Turing hypothesis there is an implicit physical assertion. Here, this assertion is presented explicitly as a physical principle: `every finitely realizable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means'. Classical physics and the universal Turing machine, because the former is continuous and the latter discrete, do not obey the principle, at least in the strong form above. A class of model computing machines that is the quantum generalization of the class of Turing machines is described, and it is shown that quantum theory and the `universal quantum computer' are compatible with the principle. Computing machines resembling the universal quantum computer could, in principle, be built and would have many remarkable properties not reproducible by any Turing machine. These do not include the computation of non-recursive functions, but they do include `quantum parallelism', a me...

Keyphrases

universal quantum computer quantum theory church-turing principle many remarkable property quantum parallelism strong form universal model physical principle machine operating non-recursive function realizable physical system universal turing machine latter discrete turing machine quantum generalization finite mean church-turing hypothesis implicit physical assertion classical physic

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