Logic and interactions 2012

Within the realm of computer science, it is common to use higher-level structures to simplify the design of algorithms, and abstract away from all the low-level details. For example, computers run at the lowest level on bits, but computer programmers use high-level languages to abstract away from simple logic gates acting on these individual bits. This talk looks at how we can extend these ideas within the realm of quantum computation, and looks at how we can model a low-level quantum mechanical system in terms of a higher-level language, or in terms of higher level constructs within a quantum programming language. In particular, we will focus on ideas that have arisen within the functional paradigm, and see that the side-effects inherent in the measurement aspects of quantum computation play nicely with constructs from pure functional languages, such as Monads in Haskell, that are used to give explicit access to effects.