English

Kolmogorov complexity of unitary transformations in quantum computing

Quantum Physics 2022-01-20 v6 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We introduce a notion of Kolmogorov complexity of unitary transformation, which can (roughly) be understood as the least possible amount of information required to fully describe and reconstruct a given finite unitary transformation. In the context of quantum computing, it corresponds to the least possible amount of data to define and describe a quantum circuit or quantum computer program. Our Kolmogorov complexity of unitary transformation is built upon Kolmogorov "qubit complexity" of Berthiaume, W. Van Dam and S. Laplante via mapping from unitary transformations to positive operators, which are subsequently "purified". We discuss the optimality of our notion of Kolmogorov complexity in a broad sense and obtain a simple complexity bound.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.05937,
  title  = {Kolmogorov complexity of unitary transformations in quantum computing},
  author = {Alexei Kaltchenko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.05937},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

11 pages, no figures, an error corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:49:24.572Z