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Proving Quantum Programs Correct

Authors Kesha Hietala , Robert Rand , Shih-Han Hung , Liyi Li , Michael Hicks

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Hardware → Quantum computation
  • Software and its engineering → Formal software verification
Keywords
  • Formal Verification
  • Quantum Computing
  • Proof Engineering

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Abstract

As quantum computing progresses steadily from theory into practice, programmers will face a common problem: How can they be sure that their code does what they intend it to do? This paper presents encouraging results in the application of mechanized proof to the domain of quantum programming in the context of the SQIR development. It verifies the correctness of a range of a quantum algorithms including Grover’s algorithm and quantum phase estimation, a key component of Shor’s algorithm. In doing so, it aims to highlight both the successes and challenges of formal verification in the quantum context and motivate the theorem proving community to target quantum computing as an application domain.

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Kesha Hietala, Robert Rand, Shih-Han Hung, Liyi Li, and Michael Hicks. Proving Quantum Programs Correct. In 12th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 193, pp. 21:1-21:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITP.2021.21

Author Details

Kesha Hietala
  • University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Robert Rand
  • University of Chicago, IL, USA
Shih-Han Hung
  • University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Liyi Li
  • University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Michael Hicks
  • University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Quantum Testbed Pathfinder Program under Award Number DE-SC0019040 and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Grant No. FA95502110051.

Acknowledgements

We thank Yuxiang Peng for ongoing contributions to the SQIR codebase and pointing out a bug in our original specification for QPE. We thank Xiaodi Wu for discussions about SQIR and follow-on projects.

Supplementary Materials

References

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