Abstract

A few conventions for thinking about and writing quantum pseudocode are proposed. The conventions can be used for presenting any quantum algorithm down to the lowest level and are consistent with a quantum random access machine (QRAM) model for quantum computing. In principle a formal version of quantum pseudocode could be used in a future extension of a conventional language. Note: This report is preliminary. Please let me know of any suggestions, omissions or errors so that I can correct them before distributing this work more widely. 1 Introduction It is increasingly clear that practical quantum computing will take place on a classical machine with access to quantum registers. The classical machine performs off-line classical computations and controls the evolution of the quantum registers by initializing them in certain preparable states, operating on them with elementary unitary operations and measuring them when needed. Although architectures for an integrated machine are far f...

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