Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
pennylane.ai
Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#2Wow, I didn’t expect to see ZX here. Its related to my PhD. You can find a lot of ZX related literature on [1]. [2] is a really nice introduction. If you want to play with it in python take a look at pyzx [3].
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#3Wow, I didn’t expect to see ZX here. Its related to my PhD. You can find a lot of ZX related literature on [1]. [2] is a really nice introduction. If you want to play with it in python take a look at pyzx [3]. [1] https://zxcalculus.com/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.13966 [3] https://github.com/Quantomatic/pyzx
Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists?
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#4Wow, I didn’t expect to see ZX here. Its related to my PhD. You can find a lot of ZX related literature on [1]. [2] is a really nice introduction. If you want to play with it in python take a look at pyzx [3]. [1] https://zxcalculus.com/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.13966 [3] https://github.com/Quantomatic/pyzx
Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists?
> Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists?
Turing's and Church's investigations into the various theoretical computing calculi are enormously useful, even though both were done well before the existence of anything we'd recognize as a modern general-purpose computer.
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists?
> Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists? Turing's and Church's investigations into the various theoretical computing calculi are enormously useful, even though both were done well before the existence of anything we'd recognize as a modern general-purpose computer.
I have a ZX-81 in the basement that won't take to much work to get running.
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists?
> Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists? Turing's and Church's investigations into the various theoretical computing calculi are enormously useful, even though both were done well before the existence of anything we'd recognize as a modern general-purpose computer.
That's not a bad approximation but consider that we did have computers being used in anger (to kill people, even) very shortly after, where are the quantum computers today?
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists?
> Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists? Turing's and Church's investigations into the various theoretical computing calculi are enormously useful, even though both were done well before the existence of anything we'd recognize as a modern general-purpose computer.
Yeah but you at least had analog forms of things that represented mechanical work through computation (looms, relays, etc...). Nothing exists at all in terms of physical worth in relation to quantum computing and nothing is even close to being _real_ besides a model of a theoretical physical computation that has to be checked by classical means. So I don't really get why there exists a language for it.
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists? Turing's and Church's investigations into the various theoretical computing calculi are enormously useful, even though both were done well before the existence of anything we'd recognize as a modern general-purpose computer.
Yeah but you at least had analog forms of things that represented mechanical work through computation (looms, relays, etc...). Nothing exists at all in terms of physical worth in relation to quantum computing and nothing is even close to being _real_ besides a model of a theoretical physical computation that has to be checked by classical means. So I don't really get why there exists a language for it.
Let me give you one example to illustrate the general principle. Any quantum computer we build will be too noisy to do any useful computation as is. To counter this, it is necessary to employ (quantum) error-correction at the software level to reduce the noise sufficiently to do useful computation.
While a lot of quantum error-correction algorithms have been developed using traditional techniques, they are still not good enough and there appears to be still lots of room for improvement. The usage of ZX-calculus has already started to yield novel insights into how to design these better algorithms. The change of language gives a new perspective that helps quite a lot.
Hence, ZX calculus is helping to bring quantum computers much closer to reality.
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#9These are basically interaction nets with different rules than those used for lambda calculus.
> Interaction nets are a graphical model of computation devised by Yves Lafont in 1990
Re: Introduction to the ZX-Calculus
#10Wow, I didn’t expect to see ZX here. Its related to my PhD. You can find a lot of ZX related literature on [1]. [2] is a really nice introduction. If you want to play with it in python take a look at pyzx [3]. [1] https://zxcalculus.com/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.13966 [3] https://github.com/Quantomatic/pyzx
Why is it useful in a world where no quantum computer physically exists?
Not specifically ZX, but rather any non-trivial technique for modeling quantum dynamics (or some subset of such dynamics) is extremely useful: it lets you study what is the boundary between classical and quantum algorithms.
Consider that I am excited even about the worst case scenario: I am a researcher working on building quantum hardware -- if one day techniques like these show that you can actually simulate a complete quantum computer efficiently in a classical computer, then my whole field will die. But that would be a monumental win because we would have learnt incredibly deep truths about the laws of math and nature.
Or more realistically and practically, currently such techniques let us model small parts of the quantum hardware and let us make informed decisions about how to proceed with building it.