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Central to near-term quantum machine learning is the use of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. This paper develops a formal framework for describing these algorithms in terms of string diagrams: a key step towards integrating these hybrid algorithms into existing work using string diagrams for machine learning and differentiable programming. A notable feature of our string diagrams is the use of functor boxes, which correspond to a quantum-classical interfaces. The functor used is a lax monoidal functor embedding the quantum systems into classical, and the lax monoidality imposes restrictions on the string diagrams when extracting classical data from quantum systems via measurement. In this way, our framework provides initial steps toward a denotational semantics for hybrid quantum machine learning algorithms that captures important features of quantum-classical interactions., Comment: 12 + 6 pages

A catalysis state is a quantum state that is used to make some desired operation possible or more efficient, while not being consumed in the process. Recent years have seen catalysis used in state-of-the-art protocols for implementing magic state distillation or small angle phase rotations. In this paper we will see that we can also use catalysis to prove that certain gate sets are computationally universal, and to extend completeness results of graphical languages to larger fragments. In particular, we give a simple proof of the computational universality of the CS+Hadamard gate set using the catalysis of a $T$ gate using a CS gate, which sidesteps the more complicated analytic arguments of the original proof by Kitaev. This then also gives us a simple self-contained proof of the computational universality of Toffoli+Hadamard. Additionally, we show that the phase-free ZH-calculus can be extended to a larger complete fragment, just by using a single catalysis rule (and one scalar rule)., Comment: 12+5 pages

This is the second in a series of "graphical grokking" papers in which we study how stabiliser codes can be understood using the ZX-calculus. In this paper we show that certain complex rules involving ZX-diagrams, called spider nest identities, can be captured succinctly using the scalable ZX-calculus, and all such identities can be proved inductively from a single new rule using the Clifford ZX-calculus. This can be combined with the ZX picture of CSS codes, developed in the first "grokking" paper, to give a simple characterisation of the set of all transversal diagonal gates at the third level of the Clifford hierarchy implementable in an arbitrary CSS code., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2024, arXiv:2408.05113

A quantum circuit may be strongly classically simulated with the aid of ZX-calculus by decomposing its $t$ T-gates into a sum of $2^{\alpha t}$ classically computable stabiliser terms. In this paper, we introduce a general procedure to find an optimal pattern of vertex cuts in a ZX-diagram to maximise its T-count reduction at the cost of the fewest cuts. Rather than reducing a Clifford+T diagram based on a fixed routine of decomposing its T-gates directly (as is the conventional approach), we focus instead on taking advantage of certain patterns and structures common to such circuits to, in effect, design by automatic procedure an arrangement of spider decompositions that is optimised for the particular circuit. In short, this works by assigning weights to vertices based on how many T-like gates they are blocking from fusing/cancelling and then appropriately propagating these weights through any neighbours which are then blocking weighted vertices from fusing, and so on. Ultimately, this then provides a set of weightings on relevant nodes, which can then each be cut, starting from the highest weighted down. While this is a heuristic approach, we show that, for circuits small enough to verify, this method achieves the most optimal set of cuts possible $71\%$ of the time. Furthermore, there is no upper bound for the efficiency achieved by this method, allowing, in principle, an effective decomposition efficiency $\alpha\rightarrow0$ for highly structured circuits. Even applied to random pseudo-structured circuits (produced from CNOTs, phase gates, and Toffolis), we record the number of stabiliser terms required to reduce all T-gates, via our method as compared to that of the more conventional T-decomposition approaches (namely \cite{kissinger21}, with $\alpha\approx0.47$), and show consistent improvements of orders of magnitude, with an effective efficiency $0.1\lesssim\alpha\lesssim0.2$., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2024, arXiv:2408.05113

The $\mathrm{Caus}[-]$ construction takes a base category of ``raw materials'' and builds a category of higher order causal processes, that is a category whose types encode causal (a.k.a. signalling) constraints between collections of systems. Notable examples are categories of higher-order stochastic maps and higher-order quantum channels. Well-typedness in $\mathrm{Caus}[-]$ corresponds to a composition of processes being causally consistent, in the sense that any choice of local processes of the prescribed types yields an overall process respecting causality constraints. It follows that closed processes always occur with probability 1, ruling out e.g. causal paradoxes arising from time loops. It has previously been shown that $\mathrm{Caus}[\mathcal{C}]$ gives a model of MLL+MIX and BV logic, hence these logics give sufficient conditions for causal consistency, but they fail to provide a complete characterisation. In this follow-on work, we introduce graph types as a tool to examine causal structures over graphs in this model. We explore their properties, standard forms, and equivalent definitions; in particular, a process obeys all signalling constraints of the graph iff it is expressible as an affine combination of factorisations into local causal processes connected according to the edges of the graph. The properties of graph types are then used to prove completeness for causal consistency of a new causal logic that conservatively extends pomset logic. The crucial extra ingredient is a notion of distinguished atoms that correspond to first-order states, which only admit a flow of information in one direction. Using the fact that causal logic conservatively extends pomset logic, we finish by giving a physically-meaningful interpretation to a separating statement between pomset and BV.

The ZX-calculus is an algebraic formalism that allows quantum computations to be simplified via a small number of simple graphical rewrite rules. Recently, it was shown that, when combined with a family of "sum-over-Cliffords" techniques, the ZX-calculus provides a powerful tool for classical simulation of quantum circuits. However, for several important classical simulation tasks, such as computing the probabilities associated with many measurement outcomes of a single quantum circuit, this technique results in reductions over many very similar diagrams, where much of the same computational work is repeated. In this paper, we show that the majority of this work can be shared across branches, by developing reduction strategies that can be run parametrically on diagrams with boolean free parameters. As parameters only need to be fixed after the bulk of the simplification work is already done, we show that it is possible to perform the final stage of classical simulation quickly utilising a high degree of GPU parallelism. Using these methods, we demonstrate speedups upwards of 100x for certain classical simulation tasks vs. the non-parametric approach.

Parametrised quantum circuits contain phase gates whose phase is determined by a classical algorithm prior to running the circuit on a quantum device. Such circuits are used in variational algorithms like QAOA and VQE. In order for these algorithms to be as efficient as possible it is important that we use the fewest number of parameters. We show that, while the general problem of minimising the number of parameters is NP-hard, when we restrict to circuits that are Clifford apart from parametrised phase gates and where each parameter is used just once, we can efficiently find the optimal parameter count. We show that when parameter transformations are required to be sufficiently well-behaved that the only rewrites that reduce parameters correspond to simple 'fusions'. Using this we find that a previous circuit optimisation strategy by some of the authors [Kissinger, van de Wetering. PRA (2019)] finds the optimal number of parameters. Our proof uses the ZX-calculus. We also prove that the standard rewrite rules of the ZX-calculus suffice to prove any equality between parametrised Clifford circuits.

Quantum theory is often regarded as challenging to learn and teach, with advanced mathematical prerequisites ranging from complex numbers and probability theory to matrix multiplication, vector space algebra and symbolic manipulation within the Hilbert space formalism. It is traditionally considered an advanced undergraduate or graduate-level subject. In this work, we challenge the conventional view by proposing "Quantum Picturalism" as a new approach to teaching the fundamental concepts of quantum theory and computation. We establish the foundations and methodology for an ongoing educational experiment to investigate the question "From what age can students learn quantum theory if taught using a diagrammatic approach?". We anticipate that the primary benefit of leveraging such a diagrammatic approach, which is conceptually intuitive yet mathematically rigorous, will be eliminating some of the most daunting barriers to teaching and learning this subject while enabling young learners to reason proficiently about high-level problems. We posit that transitioning from symbolic presentations to pictorial ones will increase the appeal of STEM education, attracting more diverse audience., Comment: In proceedings of the 2nd Quantum Science and Engineering Education Conference (QSEEC), co-located with the 4th IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)

Though the topic of causal inference is typically considered in the context of classical statistical models, recent years have seen great interest in extending causal inference techniques to quantum and generalized theories. Causal identification is a type of causal inference problem concerned with recovering from observational data and qualitative assumptions the causal mechanisms generating the data, and hence the effects of hypothetical interventions. A major obstacle to a theory of causal identification in the quantum setting is the question of what should play the role of "observational data," as any means of extracting data at a certain locus will almost certainly disturb the system. Hence, one might think a priori that quantum measurements are already too much like interventions, so that the problem of causal identification trivializes. This is not the case. Fixing a limited class of quantum instruments (namely the class of all projective measurements) to play the role of "observations," we note that as in the classical setting, there exist scenarios for which causal identification is not possible. We then present sufficient conditions for quantum causal identification, starting with a quantum analogue of the well-known "front-door criterion" and finishing with a broader class of scenarios for which the effect of a single intervention is identifiable. These results emerge from generalizing the process-theoretic account of classical causal inference due to Jacobs, Kissinger, and Zanasi beyond the setting of Markov categories, and thereby treating the classical and quantum problems uniformly., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2022, arXiv:2311.08375

A common approach to quantum circuit transformation is to use the properties of a specific gate set to create an efficient representation of a given circuit's unitary, such as a parity matrix or stabiliser tableau, and then resynthesise an improved circuit, e.g. with fewer gates or respecting connectivity constraints. Since these methods rely on a restricted gate set, generalisation to arbitrary circuits usually involves slicing the circuit into pieces that can be resynthesised and working with these separately. The choices made about what gates should go into each slice can have a major effect on the performance of the resynthesis. In this paper we propose an alternative approach to generalising these resynthesis algorithms to general quantum circuits. Instead of cutting the circuit into slices, we "cut out" the gates we can't resynthesise leaving holes in our quantum circuit. The result is a second-order process called a quantum comb, which can be resynthesised directly. We apply this idea to the RowCol algorithm, which resynthesises CNOT circuits for topologically constrained hardware, explaining how we were able to extend it to work for quantum combs. We then compare the generalisation of RowCol using our method to the naive "slice and build" method empirically on a variety of circuit sizes and hardware topologies. Finally, we outline how quantum combs could be used to help generalise other resynthesis algorithms., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2023, arXiv:2308.15489

In this work, we present a generic approach to transform CSS codes by building upon their equivalence to phase-free ZX diagrams. Using the ZX calculus, we demonstrate diagrammatic transformations between encoding maps associated with different codes. As a motivating example, we give explicit transformations between the Steane code and the quantum Reed-Muller code, since by switching between these two codes, one can obtain a fault-tolerant universal gate set. To this end, we propose a bidirectional rewrite rule to find a (not necessarily transversal) physical implementation for any logical ZX diagram in any CSS code. Then we focus on two code transformation techniques: code morphing, a procedure that transforms a code while retaining its fault-tolerant gates, and gauge fixing, where complimentary codes can be obtained from a common subsystem code (e.g., the Steane and the quantum Reed-Muller codes from the [[15,1,3,3]] code). We provide explicit graphical derivations for these techniques and show how ZX and graphical encoder maps relate several equivalent perspectives on these code-transforming operations., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2023, arXiv:2308.15489

Unitary fusion categories formalise the algebraic theory of topological quantum computation. These categories come naturally enriched in a subcategory of the category of Hilbert spaces, and by looking at this subcategory, one can identify a collection of generators for implementing quantum computation. We represent such generators for the Fibonacci and Ising models, namely the encoding of qubits and the associated braid group representations, with the ZX-calculus and show that in both cases, the Yang-Baxter equation is directly connected to an important rule in the complete ZX-calculus known as the P-rule, which enables one to interchange the phase gates defined with respect to complementary bases. In the Ising case, this reduces to a familiar rule relating two distinct Euler decompositions of the Hadamard gate as $\pi/2$ Z- and X-phase gates, whereas in the Fibonacci case, we give a previously unconsidered exact solution of the P-rule involving the Golden ratio. We demonstrate the utility of these representations by giving graphical derivations of the single-qubit braid equations for Fibonacci anyons and the single- and two-qubit braid equations for Ising anyons. We furthermore present a fully graphical procedure for simulating and simplifying braids with the ZX-representation of Fibonacci anyons.

The notion of a joint system, as captured by the monoidal (a.k.a. tensor) product, is fundamental to the compositional, process-theoretic approach to physical theories. Promonoidal categories generalise monoidal categories by replacing the functors normally used to form joint systems with profunctors. Intuitively, this allows the formation of joint systems which may not always give a system again, but instead a generalised system given by a presheaf. This extra freedom gives a new, richer notion of joint systems that can be applied to categorical formulations of spacetime. Whereas previous formulations have relied on partial monoidal structure that is only defined on pairs of independent (i.e. spacelike separated) systems, here we give a concrete formulation of spacetime where the notion of a joint system is defined for any pair of systems as a presheaf. The representable presheaves correspond precisely to those actual systems that arise from combining spacelike systems, whereas more general presheaves correspond to virtual systems which inherit some of the logical/compositional properties of their ``actual'' counterparts. We show that there are two ways of doing this, corresponding roughly to relativistic versions of conjunction and disjunction. The former endows the category of spacetime slices in a Lorentzian manifold with a promonoidal structure, whereas the latter augments this structure with an (even more) generalised way to combine systems that fails the interchange law., Comment: In Proceedings ACT 2022, arXiv:2307.15519

The Caus[-] construction takes a compact closed category of basic processes and yields a *-autonomous category of higher-order processes obeying certain signalling/causality constraints, as dictated by the type system in the resulting category. This paper looks at instances where the base category C satisfies additional properties yielding an affine-linear structure on Caus[C] and a substantially richer internal logic. While the original construction only gave multiplicative linear logic, here we additionally obtain additives and a non-commutative, self-dual sequential product yielding a model of Guglielmi's BV logic. Furthermore, we obtain a natural interpretation for the sequential product as "A can signal to B, but not vice-versa", which sits as expected between the non-signalling tensor and the fully-signalling (i.e. unconstrained) par. Fixing matrices of positive numbers for C recovers the BV category structure of probabilistic coherence spaces identified by Blute, Panangaden, and Slavnov, restricted to normalised maps. On the other hand, fixing the category of completely positive maps gives an entirely new model of BV consisting of higher order quantum channels, encompassing recent work in the study of quantum and indefinite causal structures.

We provide a new characterisation of quantum supermaps in terms of an axiom that refers only to sequential and parallel composition. Consequently, we generalize quantum supermaps to arbitrary monoidal categories and operational probabilistic theories. We do so by providing a simple definition of locally-applicable transformation on a monoidal category. The definition can be rephrased in the language of category theory using the principle of naturality, and can be given an intuitive diagrammatic representation in terms of which all proofs are presented. In our main technical contribution, we use this diagrammatic representation to show that locally-applicable transformations on quantum channels are in one-to-one correspondence with deterministic quantum supermaps. This alternative characterization of quantum supermaps is proven to work for more general multiple-input supermaps such as the quantum switch and on arbitrary normal convex spaces of quantum channels such as those defined by satisfaction of signaling constraints.

In this paper, we demonstrate a direct correspondence between phase-free ZX diagrams, a graphical notation for representing and manipulating a certain class of linear maps on qubits, and Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes, a large family of quantum error correcting codes constructed from classical codes, including for example the Steane code, surface codes, and colour codes. The stabilisers of a CSS code have an especially nice structure arising from a pair of orthogonal $\mathbb F_2$-linear subspaces, or in the case of maximal CSS codes, a single subspace and its orthocomplement. On the other hand, phase-free ZX diagrams can always be efficiently reduced to a normal form given by the basis elements of an $\mathbb F_2$-linear subspace. Here, we will show that these two ways of describing a quantum state by an $\mathbb F_2$-linear subspace $S$ are in fact the same. Namely, the maximal CSS code generated by $S$ fixes the quantum state whose ZX normal form is also given by $S$. This insight gives us an immediate translation from stabilisers of a maximal CSS code into a ZX diagram describing its associated state. We show that we can extend this translation to stabilisers and logical operators of any (possibly non-maximal) CSS code by "bending wires". To demonstrate the utility of this translation, we give a simple picture of the surface code and a fully graphical derivation of the action of physical lattice surgery operations on the space of logical qubits, completing the ZX presentation of lattice surgery initiated by de Beudrap and Horsman., Comment: 14 pages, many diagrams

Recent developments in classical simulation of quantum circuits make use of clever decompositions of chunks of magic states into sums of efficiently simulable stabiliser states. We show here how, by considering certain non-stabiliser entangled states which have more favourable decompositions, we can speed up these simulations. This is made possible by using the ZX-calculus, which allows us to easily find instances of these entangled states in the simplified diagram representing the quantum circuit to be simulated. We additionally find a new technique of partial stabiliser decompositions that allow us to trade magic states for stabiliser terms. With this technique we require only $2^{\alpha t}$ stabiliser terms, where $\alpha\approx 0.396$, to simulate a circuit with T-count $t$. This matches the $\alpha$ found by Qassim et al., but whereas they only get this scaling in the asymptotic limit, ours applies for a circuit of any size. Our method builds upon a recently proposed scheme for simulation combining stabiliser decompositions and optimisation strategies implemented in the software QuiZX. With our techniques we manage to reliably simulate 50-qubit 1400 T-count hidden shift circuits in a couple of minutes on a consumer laptop., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

The ZX-calculus is a graphical language for reasoning about quantum computation using ZX-diagrams, a certain flexible generalisation of quantum circuits that can be used to represent linear maps from $m$ to $n$ qubits for any $m,n \geq 0$. Some applications for the ZX-calculus, such as quantum circuit optimisation and synthesis, rely on being able to efficiently translate a ZX-diagram back into a quantum circuit of comparable size. While several sufficient conditions are known for describing families of ZX-diagrams that can be efficiently transformed back into circuits, it has previously been conjectured that the general problem of circuit extraction is hard. That is, that it should not be possible to efficiently convert an arbitrary ZX-diagram describing a unitary linear map into an equivalent quantum circuit. In this paper we prove this conjecture by showing that the circuit extraction problem is #P-hard, and so is itself at least as hard as strong simulation of quantum circuits. In addition to our main hardness result, which relies specifically on the circuit representation, we give a representation-agnostic hardness result. Namely, we show that any oracle that takes as input a ZX-diagram description of a unitary and produces samples of the output of the associated quantum computation enables efficient probabilistic solutions to NP-complete problems., Comment: 15 pages + 3 page appendix

In measurement-based quantum computing (MBQC), computation is carried out by a sequence of measurements and corrections on an entangled state. Flow, and related concepts, are powerful techniques for characterising the dependence of the corrections on previous measurement outcomes. We introduce flow-based methods for MBQC with qudit graph states, which we call Zd-flow, when the local dimension is an odd prime. Our main results are proofs that Zd-flow is a necessary and sufficient condition for a strong form of outcome determinism. Along the way, we find a suitable generalisation of the concept of measurement planes to this setting and characterise the allowed measurements in a qudit MBQC. We also provide a polynomial-time algorithm for finding an optimal Zd-flow whenever one exists., Comment: 16 pages + 10 pages of appendices, 1 figure

In this paper we address the problem of proving confluence for string diagram rewriting, which was previously shown to be characterised combinatorically as double-pushout rewriting with interfaces (DPOI) on (labelled) hypergraphs. For standard DPO rewriting without interfaces, confluence for terminating rewrite systems is, in general, undecidable. Nevertheless, we show here that confluence for DPOI, and hence string diagram rewriting, is decidable. We apply this result to give effective procedures for deciding local confluence of symmetric monoidal theories with and without Frobenius structure by critical pair analysis. For the latter, we introduce the new notion of path joinability for critical pairs, which enables finitely many joins of a critical pair to be lifted to an arbitrary context in spite of the strong non-local constraints placed on rewriting in a generic symmetric monoidal theory.

We introduce an enhanced technique for strong classical simulation of quantum circuits which combines the `sum-of-stabilisers' method with an automated simplification strategy based on the ZX-calculus. Recently it was shown that quantum circuits can be classically simulated by expressing the non-stabiliser gates in a circuit as magic state injections and decomposing them in chunks of 2-6 states at a time, obtaining sums of (efficiently-simulable) stabiliser states with many fewer terms than the naive approach. We adapt these techniques from the original setting of Clifford circuits with magic state injection to generic ZX-diagrams and show that, by interleaving this "chunked" decomposition with a ZX-calculus-based simplification strategy, we can obtain stabiliser decompositions that are many orders of magnitude smaller than existing approaches. We illustrate this technique to perform exact norm calculations (and hence strong simulation) on the outputs of random 50- and 100-qubit Clifford+T circuits with up to 70 T-gates as well as a family of hidden shift circuits previously considered by Bravyi and Gosset with over 1000 T-gates., Comment: 16 pages, 6 charts, and many figures. For instructions on running associated software, see https://github.com/Quantomatic/quizx/blob/stabrank-v1/stabrank.md

Symplectic vector spaces are the phase spaces of linear mechanical systems. The symplectic form describes, for example, the relation between position and momentum as well as current and voltage. The category of linear Lagrangian relations between symplectic vector spaces is a symmetric monoidal subcategory of relations which gives a semantics for the evolution -- and more generally linear constraints on the evolution -- of various physical systems. We give a new presentation of the category of Lagrangian relations over an arbitrary field as a `doubled' category of linear relations. More precisely, we show that it arises as a variation of Selinger's CPM construction applied to linear relations, where the covariant orthogonal complement functor plays the role of conjugation. Furthermore, for linear relations over prime fields, this corresponds exactly to the CPM construction for a suitable choice of dagger. We can furthermore extend this construction by a single affine shift operator to obtain a category of affine Lagrangian relations. Using this new presentation, we prove the equivalence of the prop of affine Lagrangian relations with the prop of qudit stabilizer theory in odd prime dimensions. We hence obtain a unified graphical language for several disparate process theories, including electrical circuits, Spekkens' toy theory, and odd-prime-dimensional stabilizer quantum circuits., Comment: In Proceedings ACT 2021, arXiv:2211.01102

Symmetric monoidal theories (SMTs) generalise algebraic theories in a way that make them suitable to express resource-sensitive systems, in which variables cannot be copied or discarded at will. In SMTs, traditional tree-like terms are replaced by string diagrams, topological entities that can be intuitively thoughts as diagrams of wires and boxes. Recently, string diagrams have become increasingly popular as a graphical syntax to reason about computational models across diverse fields, including programming language semantics, circuit theory, quantum mechanics, linguistics, and control theory. In applications, it is often convenient to implement the equations appearing in SMTs as rewriting rules. This poses the challenge of extending the traditional theory of term rewriting, which has been developed for algebraic theories, to string diagrams. In this paper, we develop a mathematical theory of string diagram rewriting for SMTs. Our approach exploits the correspondence between string diagram rewriting and double pushout (DPO) rewriting of certain graphs, introduced in the first paper of this series. Such a correspondence is only sound when the SMT includes a Frobenius algebra structure. In the present work, we show how an analogous correspondence may be established for arbitrary SMTs, once an appropriate notion of DPO rewriting (which we call convex) is identified. As proof of concept, we use our approach to show termination of two SMTs of interest: Frobenius semi-algebras and bialgebras.

There are various gate sets used for describing quantum computation. A particularly popular one consists of Clifford gates and arbitrary single-qubit phase gates. Computations in this gate set can be elegantly described by the ZX-calculus, a graphical language for a class of string diagrams describing linear maps between qubits. The ZX-calculus has proven useful in a variety of areas of quantum information, but is less suitable for reasoning about operations outside its natural gate set such as multi-linear Boolean operations like the Toffoli gate. In this paper we study the ZH-calculus, an alternative graphical language of string diagrams that does allow straightforward encoding of Toffoli gates and other more complicated Boolean logic circuits. We find a set of simple rewrite rules for this calculus and show it is complete with respect to matrices over $\mathbb{Z}[\frac12]$, which correspond to the approximately universal Toffoli+Hadamard gateset. Furthermore, we construct an extended version of the ZH-calculus that is complete with respect to matrices over any ring $R$ where $1+1$ is not a zero-divisor., Comment: 68 pages, many many diagrams

This paper is a `spiritual child' of the 2005 lecture notes Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics, which showed how a simple, pictorial extension of Dirac notation allowed several quantum features to be easily expressed and derived, using language even a kindergartner can understand. Central to that approach was the use of pictures and pictorial transformation rules to understand and derive features of quantum theory and computation. However, this approach left many wondering `where's the beef?' In other words, was this new approach capable of producing new results, or was it simply an aesthetically pleasing way to restate stuff we already know? The aim of this sequel paper is to say `here's the beef!', and highlight some of the major results of the approach advocated in Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics, and how they are being applied to tackle practical problems on real quantum computers. We will focus mainly on what has become the Swiss army knife of the pictorial formalism: the ZX-calculus. First we look at some of the ideas behind the ZX-calculus, comparing and contrasting it with the usual quantum circuit formalism. We then survey results from the past 2 years falling into three categories: (1) completeness of the rules of the ZX-calculus, (2) state-of-the-art quantum circuit optimisation results in commercial and open-source quantum compilers relying on ZX, and (3) the use of ZX in translating real-world stuff like natural language into quantum circuits that can be run on today's (very limited) quantum hardware. We also take the title literally, and outline an ongoing experiment aiming to show that ZX-calculus enables children to do cutting-edge quantum computing stuff. If anything, this would truly confirm that `kindergarten quantum mechanics' wasn't just a joke., Comment: 30 pages, many pictures, including legos

String diagrams are a powerful and intuitive graphical syntax, originated in the study of symmetric monoidal categories. In the last few years, they have found application in the modelling of various computational structures, in fields as diverse as Computer Science, Physics, Control Theory, Linguistics, and Biology. In many such proposals, the transformations of the described systems are modelled as rewrite rules of diagrams. These developments demand a mathematical foundation for string diagram rewriting: whereas rewrite theory for terms is well-understood, the two-dimensional nature of string diagrams poses additional challenges. This work systematises and expands a series of recent conference papers laying down such foundation. As first step, we focus on the case of rewrite systems for string diagrammatic theories which feature a Frobenius algebra. This situation ubiquitously appear in various approaches: for instance, in the algebraic semantics of linear dynamical systems, Frobenius structures model the wiring of circuits; in categorical quantum mechanics, they model interacting quantum observables. Our work introduces a combinatorial interpretation of string diagram rewriting modulo Frobenius structures, in terms of double-pushout hypergraph rewriting. Furthermore, we prove this interpretation to be sound and complete. In the last part, we also see that the approach can be generalised to model rewriting modulo multiple Frobenius structures. As a proof of concept, we show how to derive from these results a termination strategy for Interacting Bialgebras, an important rewrite theory in the study of quantum circuits and signal flow graphs.

We provide a graphical treatment of SAT and #SAT on equal footing. Instances of #SAT can be represented as tensor networks in a standard way. These tensor networks are interpreted by diagrams of the ZH-calculus: a system to reason about tensors over C in terms of diagrams built from simple generators, in which computation may be carried out by transformations of diagrams alone. In general, nodes of ZH diagrams take parameters over C which determine the tensor coefficients; for the standard representation of #SAT instances, the coefficients take the value 0 or 1. Then, by choosing the coefficients of a diagram to range over B, we represent the corresponding instance of SAT. Thus, by interpreting a diagram either over the boolean semiring or the complex numbers, we instantiate either the decision or counting version of the problem. We find that for classes known to be in P, such as 2SAT and #XORSAT, the existence of appropriate rewrite rules allows for efficient simplification of the diagram, producing the solution in polynomial time. In contrast, for classes known to be NP-complete, such as 3SAT, or #P-complete, such as #2SAT, the corresponding rewrite rules introduce hyperedges to the diagrams, in numbers which are not easily bounded above by a polynomial. This diagrammatic approach unifies the diagnosis of the complexity of CSPs and #CSPs and shows promise in aiding tensor network contraction-based algorithms., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2020, arXiv:2109.01534

The ZH-calculus is a complete graphical calculus for linear maps between qubits that admits a straightforward encoding of hypergraph states and circuits arising from the Toffoli+Hadamard gate set. In this paper, we establish a correspondence between the ZH-calculus and the path-sum formalism, a technique recently introduced by Amy to verify quantum circuits. In particular, we find a bijection between certain canonical forms of ZH-diagrams and path-sum expressions. We then introduce and prove several new simplification rules for the ZH-calculus, which are in direct correspondence to the simplification rules of the path-sum formalism. The relatively opaque path-sum rules are shown to arise naturally from two powerful families of rewrite rules in the ZH-calculus. The first is the extension of the familiar graph-theoretic simplifications based on local complementation and pivoting to their hypergraph-theoretic analogues: hyper-local complementation and hyper-pivoting. The second is the graphical Fourier transform introduced by Kuijpers et al., which enables effective simplification of ZH-diagrams encoding multi-linear phase polynomials with arbitrary real coefficients., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2020, arXiv:2109.01534

The ZX-calculus is a convenient formalism for expressing and reasoning about quantum circuits at a low level, whereas the recently-proposed ZH-calculus yields convenient expressions of mid-level quantum gates such as Toffoli and CCZ. In this paper, we will show that the two calculi are linked by Fourier transform. In particular, we will derive new Fourier expansion rules using the ZH-calculus, and show that we can straightforwardly pass between ZH- and ZX-diagrams using them. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the graphical Fourier expansion of a ZH normal-form corresponds to the standard Fourier transform of a semi-Boolean function. As an illustration of the calculational power of this technique, we then show that several tricks for reducing the T-gate cost of Toffoli circuits, which include for instance quantum adders, can be derived using graphical Fourier theory and straightforwardly generalized to more qubits., Comment: 12 pages + 7 page appendix

The ZX-calculus is a graphical language for reasoning about ZX-diagrams, a type of tensor networks that can represent arbitrary linear maps between qubits. Using the ZX-calculus, we can intuitively reason about quantum theory, and optimise and validate quantum circuits. In this paper we introduce PyZX, an open source library for automated reasoning with large ZX-diagrams. We give a brief introduction to the ZX-calculus, then show how PyZX implements methods for circuit optimisation, equality validation, and visualisation and how it can be used in tandem with other software. We end with a set of challenges that when solved would enhance the utility of automated diagrammatic reasoning., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2019, arXiv:2004.14750

Many physical implementations of quantum computers impose stringent memory constraints in which 2-qubit operations can only be performed between qubits which are nearest neighbours in a lattice or graph structure. Hence, before a computation can be run on such a device, it must be mapped onto the physical architecture. That is, logical qubits must be assigned physical locations in the quantum memory, and the circuit must be replaced by an equivalent one containing only operations between nearest neighbours. In this paper, we give a new technique for quantum circuit mapping (a.k.a. routing), based on Gaussian elimination constrained to certain optimal spanning trees called Steiner trees. We give a reference implementation of the technique for CNOT circuits and show that it significantly out-performs general-purpose routines on CNOT circuits. We then comment on how the technique can be extended straightforwardly to the synthesis of CNOT+Rz circuits and as a modification to a recently-proposed circuit simplification/extraction procedure for generic circuits based on the ZX-calculus., Comment: 15 pages

Reducing the number of non-Clifford quantum gates present in a circuit is an important task for efficiently implementing quantum computations, especially in the fault-tolerant regime. We present a new method for reducing the number of T-gates in a quantum circuit based on the ZX-calculus, which matches or beats previous approaches to T-count reduction on the majority of our benchmark circuits in the ancilla-free case, in some cases yielding up to 50% improvement. Our method begins by representing the quantum circuit as a ZX-diagram, a tensor network-like structure that can be transformed and simplified according to the rules of the ZX-calculus. We then show that a recently-proposed simplification strategy can be extended to reduce T-count using a new technique called phase teleportation. This technique allows non-Clifford phases to combine and cancel by propagating non-locally through a generic quantum circuit. Phase teleportation does not change the number or location of non-phase gates and the method also applies to arbitrary non-Clifford phase gates as well as gates with unknown phase parameters in parametrised circuits. Furthermore, the simplification strategy we use is powerful enough to validate equality of many circuits. In particular, we use it to show that our optimised circuits are indeed equal to the original ones. We have implemented the routines of this paper in the open-source library PyZX., Comment: 15 pages + references

We present a completely new approach to quantum circuit optimisation, based on the ZX-calculus. We first interpret quantum circuits as ZX-diagrams, which provide a flexible, lower-level language for describing quantum computations graphically. Then, using the rules of the ZX-calculus, we give a simplification strategy for ZX-diagrams based on the two graph transformations of local complementation and pivoting and show that the resulting reduced diagram can be transformed back into a quantum circuit. While little is known about extracting circuits from arbitrary ZX-diagrams, we show that the underlying graph of our simplified ZX-diagram always has a graph-theoretic property called generalised flow, which in turn yields a deterministic circuit extraction procedure. For Clifford circuits, this extraction procedure yields a new normal form that is both asymptotically optimal in size and gives a new, smaller upper bound on gate depth for nearest-neighbour architectures. For Clifford+T and more general circuits, our technique enables us to to `see around' gates that obstruct the Clifford structure and produce smaller circuits than naive 'cut-and-resynthesise' methods., Comment: 18 pages + appendices with examples, proofs, and pseudocode

Extracting causal relationships from observed correlations is a growing area in probabilistic reasoning, originating with the seminal work of Pearl and others from the early 1990s. This paper develops a new, categorically oriented view based on a clear distinction between syntax (string diagrams) and semantics (stochastic matrices), connected via interpretations as structure-preserving functors. A key notion in the identification of causal effects is that of an intervention, whereby a variable is forcefully set to a particular value independent of any prior propensities. We represent the effect of such an intervention as an endofunctor which performs `string diagram surgery' within the syntactic category of string diagrams. This diagram surgery in turn yields a new, interventional distribution via the interpretation functor. While in general there is no way to compute interventional distributions purely from observed data, we show that this is possible in certain special cases using a calculational tool called comb disintegration. We demonstrate the use of this technique on a well-known toy example, where we predict the causal effect of smoking on cancer in the presence of a confounding common cause. After developing this specific example, we show this technique provides simple sufficient conditions for computing interventions which apply to a wide variety of situations considered in the causal inference literature., Comment: 17 pages

We present a new graphical calculus that is sound and complete for a universal family of quantum circuits, which can be seen as the natural string-diagrammatic extension of the approximately (real-valued) universal family of Hadamard+CCZ circuits. The diagrammatic language is generated by two kinds of nodes: the so-called 'spider' associated with the computational basis, as well as a new arity-N generalisation of the Hadamard gate, which satisfies a variation of the spider fusion law. Unlike previous graphical calculi, this admits compact encodings of non-linear classical functions. For example, the AND gate can be depicted as a diagram of just 2 generators, compared to ~25 in the ZX-calculus. Consequently, N-controlled gates, hypergraph states, Hadamard+Toffoli circuits, and diagonal circuits at arbitrary levels of the Clifford hierarchy also enjoy encodings with low constant overhead. This suggests that this calculus will be significantly more convenient for reasoning about the interplay between classical non-linear behaviour (e.g. in an oracle) and purely quantum operations. After presenting the calculus, we will prove it is sound and complete for universal quantum computation by demonstrating the reduction of any diagram to an easily describable normal form., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2018, arXiv:1901.09476

This volume contains the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL 2017), which was held July 3-7, 2017 at the LUX Cinema Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and was hosted by Radboud University. QPL is a conference that brings together researchers working on mathematical foundations of quantum physics, quantum computing, and related areas, with a focus on structural perspectives and the use of logical tools, ordered algebraic and category-theoretic structures, formal languages, semantical methods, and other computer science techniques applied to the study of physical behaviour in general. This conference also welcomes work that applies structures and methods inspired by quantum theory to other fields (including computer science).

In general relativity, `causal structure' refers to the partial order on space-time points (or regions) that encodes time-like relationships. Recently, quantum information and quantum foundations saw the emergence of a `causality principle'. In the form used in this paper, which we call `process terminality', it states that when the output of a process is discarded, then the process itself may as well be discarded. While causal structure and process terminality at first seem to be entirely different notions, they become equivalent when making explicit what the partial order actually encodes, that is, that an event in the past can influence one in its future, but not vice-versa. The framework in which we establish this equivalence is that of process theories. We show how several previous results are instances of this result and comment on how this framework could provide an ideal, minimal canvas for crafting theories of quantum gravity., Comment: 5 pages. Some pictures

We provide a new way to bound the security of quantum key distribution using only two high-level, diagrammatic features of quantum processes: the compositional behavior of complementary measurements and the essential uniqueness of purification. We begin by demonstrating a proof in the simplest case, where the eavesdropper doesn't noticeably disturb the channel at all and has no quantum memory. We then show how this approach extends straightforwardly to account for an eavesdropper with quantum memory and the presence of noise., Comment: 10 pages, many string diagrams

We introduce a new family of models for measurement-based quantum computation which are deterministic and approximately universal. The resource states which play the role of graph states are prepared via 2-qubit gates of the form $\exp(-i\frac{\pi}{2^{n}} Z\otimes Z)$. When $n = 2$, these are equivalent, up to local Clifford unitaries, to graph states. However, when $n > 2$, their behaviour diverges in two important ways. First, multiple applications of the entangling gate to a single pair of qubits produces non-trivial entanglement, and hence multiple parallel edges between nodes play an important role in these generalised graph states. Second, such a state can be used to realise deterministic, approximately universal computation using only Pauli $Z$ and $X$ measurements and feed-forward. Even though, for $n > 2$, the relevant resource states are no longer stabiliser states, they admit a straightforward, graphical representation using the ZX-calculus. Using this representation, we are able to provide a simple, graphical proof of universality. We furthermore show that for every $n > 2$ this family is capable of producing all Clifford gates and all diagonal gates in the $n$-th level of the Clifford hierarchy., Comment: 19 pages, accepted for publication in Quantum (quantum-journal.org). A previous version of this article had the title: "Universal MBQC with M{\o}lmer-S{\o}rensen interactions and two measurement bases"

The abelian Hidden Subgroup Problem (HSP) is extremely general, and many problems with known quantum exponential speed-up (such as integers factorisation, the discrete logarithm and Simon's problem) can be seen as specific instances of it. The traditional presentation of the quantum protocol for the abelian HSP is low-level, and relies heavily on the the interplay between classical group theory and complex vector spaces. Instead, we give a high-level diagrammatic presentation which showcases the quantum structures truly at play. Specifically, we provide the first fully diagrammatic proof of correctness for the abelian HSP protocol, showing that strongly complementary observables are the key ingredient to its success. Being fully diagrammatic, our proof extends beyond the traditional case of finite-dimensional quantum theory: for example, we can use it to show that Simon's problem can be efficiently solved in real quantum theory, and to obtain a protocol that solves the HSP for certain infinite abelian groups., Comment: For submission to LMCS

We present a categorical construction for modelling causal structures within a general class of process theories that include the theory of classical probabilistic processes as well as quantum theory. Unlike prior constructions within categorical quantum mechanics, the objects of this theory encode fine-grained causal relationships between subsystems and give a new method for expressing and deriving consequences for a broad class of causal structures. We show that this framework enables one to define families of processes which are consistent with arbitrary acyclic causal orderings. In particular, one can define one-way signalling (a.k.a. semi-causal) processes, non-signalling processes, and quantum $n$-combs. Furthermore, our framework is general enough to accommodate recently-proposed generalisations of classical and quantum theory where processes only need to have a fixed causal ordering locally, but globally allow indefinite causal ordering. To illustrate this point, we show that certain processes of this kind, such as the quantum switch, the process matrices of Oreshkov, Costa, and Brukner, and a classical three-party example due to Baumeler, Feix, and Wolf are all instances of a certain family of processes we refer to as $\textrm{SOC}_n$ in the appropriate category of higher-order causal processes. After defining these families of causal structures within our framework, we give derivations of their operational behaviour using simple, diagrammatic axioms., Comment: Extended version of a LICS 2017 paper with the same title

Following on from the notion of (first-order) causality, which generalises the notion of being tracepreserving from CP-maps to abstract processes, we give a characterization for the most general kind of map which sends causal processes to causal processes. These new, second-order causal processes enable us to treat the input processes as 'local laboratories' whose causal ordering needs not be fixed in advance. Using this characterization, we give a fully-diagrammatic proof of a non-trivial theorem: namely that being causality-preserving on separable processes implies being 'completely' causality preserving. That is, causality is preserved even when the 'local laboratories' are allowed to have ancilla systems. An immediate consequence is that preserving causality is separable processes is equivalence to preserving causality for strongly non-signalling (a.k.a. localizable) processes., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2016, arXiv:1701.00242

This article introduces Globular, an online proof assistant for the formalization and verification of proofs in higher-dimensional category theory. The tool produces graphical visualizations of higher-dimensional proofs, assists in their construction with a point-and- click interface, and performs type checking to prevent incorrect rewrites. Hosted on the web, it has a low barrier to use, and allows hyperlinking of formalized proofs directly from research papers. It allows the formalization of proofs from logic, topology and algebra which are not formalizable by other methods, and we give several examples.

Graphs are used as models in all areas of computer science: examples are state space graphs, control flow graphs, syntax graphs, UML-type models of all kinds, network layouts, social networks, dependency graphs, and so forth. Once such graphical models are constructed, they can be analysed and transformed to verify their correctness within a domain, discover new properties, or produce new equivalent and/or optimised versions. Graphs as Models' main focus is the exchange and collaboration of researchers from different backgrounds. The workshop serves as platform to boost inter- and transdisciplinary research and wants to serve as leeway for new ideas. Thus, besides classical research presentations, the workshop is highly geared toward numerous interactive sessions. The second edition of the Graphs as Models workshop was held on 2-3 June 2016 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, colocated with the 19th European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2016).

We introduce a high-level graphical framework for designing and analysing quantum error correcting codes, centred on what we term the coherent parity check (CPC). The graphical formulation is based on the diagrammatic tools of the zx-calculus of quantum observables. The resulting framework leads to a construction for stabilizer codes that allows us to design and verify a broad range of quantum codes based on classical ones, and that gives a means of discovering large classes of codes using both analytical and numerical methods. We focus in particular on the smaller codes that will be the first used by near-term devices. We show how CSS codes form a subset of CPC codes and, more generally, how to compute stabilizers for a CPC code. As an explicit example of this framework, we give a method for turning almost any pair of classical [n,k,3] codes into a [[2n - k + 2, k, 3]] CPC code. Further, we give a simple technique for machine search which yields thousands of potential codes, and demonstrate its operation for distance 3 and 5 codes. Finally, we use the graphical tools to demonstrate how Clifford computation can be performed within CPC codes. As our framework gives a new tool for constructing small- to medium-sized codes with relatively high code rates, it provides a new source for codes that could be suitable for emerging devices, while its zx-calculus foundations enable natural integration of error correction with graphical compiler toolchains. It also provides a powerful framework for reasoning about all stabilizer quantum error correction codes of any size., Comment: Computer code associated with this paper may be found at https://doi.org/10.15128/r1bn999672k

This is the second part of a three-part overview, in which we derive the category-theoretic backbone of quantum theory from a process ontology, treating quantum theory as a theory of systems, processes and their interactions. In this part we focus on classical-quantum interaction. Classical and quantum systems are treated as distinct types, of which the respective behavioural properties are specified in terms of processes and their compositions. In particular, classicality is witnessed by 'spiders' which fuse together whenever they connect. We define mixedness and show that pure processes are extremal in the space of all processes, and we define entanglement and show that quantum theory indeed exhibits entanglement. We discuss the classification of tripartite qubit entanglement and show that both the GHZ-state and the W-state come from spider-like families of processes, which differ only in how they behave when they are connected by two or more wires. We define measurements and provide fully-comprehensive descriptions of several quantum protocols involving classical data flow. Finally, we give a notion of 'genuine quantumness', from which special processes called 'phase spiders' arise, and get a first glimpse of quantum non-locality., Comment: 54 pp., many figures

The CBH theorem characterises quantum theory within a C*-algebraic framework. Namely, mathematical properties of C*-algebras modelling quantum systems are equivalent to constraints that are information-theoretic in nature: (1) noncommutativity of subalgebras is equivalent to impossibility of signalling; (2) noncommutativity of the whole algebra is equivalent to impossibility of broadcasting; (3) the existence of entangled states is implied by the impossibility of secure bit commitment (with the converse conjectured). However, the C*-algebraic framework has drawn criticism as it already contains much of themathematical structure of quantum theory such as complex linearity. We address this issue by a generalising C*-algebras categorically. In this framework, equivalence (1) holds, equivalence (2) becomes a strict implication, and implication (3) fails in general. Thus we identify exactly what work is being done by the complex-linear structure of C*-algebras. In doing so, we uncover a richer hierarchy of notions of 'classicality' and 'quantumness' of information than visible in the concrete case., Comment: 30 pages

String diagrams are a powerful and intuitive graphical syntax for terms of symmetric monoidal categories (SMCs). They find many applications in computer science and are becoming increasingly relevant in other fields such as physics and control theory. An important role in many such approaches is played by equational theories of diagrams, typically oriented and applied as rewrite rules. This paper lays a comprehensive foundation of this form of rewriting. We interpret diagrams combinatorially as typed hypergraphs and establish the precise correspondence between diagram rewriting modulo the laws of SMCs on the one hand and double pushout (DPO) rewriting of hypergraphs, subject to a soundness condition called convexity, on the other. This result rests on a more general characterisation theorem in which we show that typed hypergraph DPO rewriting amounts to diagram rewriting modulo the laws of SMCs with a chosen special Frobenius structure. We illustrate our approach with a proof of termination for the theory of non-commutative bimonoids., Comment: preprint. 32 pages