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On the Hardness of Analyzing Quantum Programs Quantitatively

On the Hardness of Analyzing Quantum Programs Quantitatively
Martin Avanzini, Georg Moser, Romain Péchoux and Simon Perdrix
Programming Languages and Systems - 33rd European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2024, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2024, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, April 6-11, 2024, Proceedings, Part II, volume 14577 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 31–58, (2024).

Abstract

In this paper, we study quantitative properties of quantum programs. Properties of interest include (positive) almost-sure termination, expected runtime or expected cost, that is, for example, the expected number of applications of a given quantum gate, etc. After studying the completeness of these problems in the arithmetical hierarchy over the Clifford+T fragment of quantum mechanics, we express these problems using a variation of a quantum pre-expectation transformer, a weakest pre-condition based technique that allows to symbolically compute these quantitative properties. Under a smooth restriction—a restriction to polynomials of bounded degree over a real closed field—we show that the quantitative problem, which consists in finding an upper-bound to the pre-expectation, can be decided in time double-exponential in the size of a program, thus providing, despite its great complexity, one of the first decidable results on the analysis and verification of quantum programs. Finally, we sketch how the latter can be transformed into an efficient synthesis method.

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