Paper: Verification of Quantum Programs

I'm of the opinion that formal verification of programs has a limited set of applications, in large part due to the "good enough" software principle. Nonetheless, it is nice to see work in the quantum programming area. Here's a just posted paper on arXiv: Verification of Quantum Programs by Ying, Yu, Feng, and Duan.

Foundations of Quantum Programming

Here's an interesting paper: Foundations of Quantum Programming by Ying. The abstract:

Progress in the techniques of quantum devices has made people widely believe that large-scale and functional quantum computers will be eventually built. By then, super-powered quantum computer will solve many problems affecting economic and social life that cannot be addressed by classical computing. However, our experiences with classical computing suggest that once quantum computers become available in the future, quantum software will play a key role in exploiting their power, and quantum software market will even be much larger than quantum hardware market. Unfortunately, today’s software development techniques are not suited to quantum computers due to the essential differences between the nature of the classical world and that of the quantum world. To lay a solid foundation for tomorrow’s quantum software industry, it is critically essential to pursue systematic research into quantum programming methodology and techniques.

Unfortunately it is behind a pay wall at $25- which I consider steep for a 5 page article. That being said, you can view the first 3 of the 5 pages by following the "look inside" link. I strongly agree with the point we need to focus on quantum programming techniques. This is essential if we're going to hit the ground running when viable quantum computers arrive on the scene. We don't want to spend time fumbling through programming approaches like we did in the early days of classical computers.