Cove Dissertation Finished

I've finished my doctoral dissertation at Colorado Technical University, titled "Cove: A Practical Quantum Computer Programming Framework". I'll be pushing it elsewhere onto the net later on, but for now you can down load it from my Cove site here.

Here's the abstract:

While not yet in commercial existence, quantum computers have the ability to solve certain classes of problems that are not efficiently solvable on existing Turing Machine based (classical) computers. For quantum computers to be of use, methods of programming them must exist. Proposals exist for programming quantum computers, but all of the existing ones suffer from flaws that make them impractical in commercial software development environments. Cove is a framework for programming quantum computers that extends existing classical languages to allow for quantum computation, thus providing a quantum computing toolkit for commercial software developers. Since the target users of Cove are commercial developers, it is an object oriented framework that can be used by multiple languages and also places emphasis on complete documentation. The focus of Cove is not so much on the software product, but on the fundamental concepts that make quantum computing practical for common developers.

While a little lengthy, it has a lot of good background information in chapter 2 for quantum computing novices. The circuit diagrams for building up Shor's algorithm in chapter 4 and the complete list of quantum operations should also be interest to some- not to mention the framework itself.