Quantum Automata and Quantum Grammars

C. Moore and J. P. Crutchfield
Santa Fe Institute
1399 Hyde Park Rd.
Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA

ABSTRACT: To study quantum computation, it might be helpful to generalize structures from language and automata theory to the quantum case. To that end, we propose quantum versions of finite-state and push-down automata, and regular and context-free grammars. We find analogs of several classical theorems, including pumping lemmas, closure properties, rational and algebraic generating functions, and Greibach normal form. We also show that there are quantum context-free languages that are not context-free.


C. Moore and J. P. Crutchfield, "Quantum Automata and Quantum Grammars", Theoretical Computer Science (1997) submitted; [ps.gz]= 150kb
Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 97-07-062.