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Graphical Reasoning in Compact Closed Categories for Quantum Computation

Lucas Dixon and Ross Duncan

Abstract

Compact closed categories provide a foundational formalism for a variety of important domains, including quantum computation. These categories have a natural visualisation as a form of graphs. We present a formalism for equational reasoning about such graphs and develop this into a generic proof system with a fixed logical kernel for equational reasoning about compact closed categories. Automating this reasoning process is motivated by the slow and error prone nature of manual graph manipulation. A salient feature of our system is that it provides a formal and declarative account of derived results that can include `ellipses'-style notation. We illustrate the framework by instantiating it for a graphical language of quantum computation and show how this can be used to perform symbolic computation.

Journal
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Keywords
categorical quantum mechanics; compact closed categories; rewriting; graphical calculi
Note
preprint available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0514
Year
2009