TITLE

Data: Superpositions

VERSION

  Maintainer: Damian Conway <damian@conway.org>
  Date: 14 Sep 2000
  Last Modified: 18 Sep 2000
  Mailing List: perl6-language-data@perl.org
  Number: 225
  Version: 2
  Status: Frozen

ABSTRACT

This RFC (seriously) proposes Perl 6 provide any and all operators, and, thereby, conjunctive and disjunctive superpositional types.

DESCRIPTION

The advantages and possibilities of superpositional programming were demonstrated in well-received presentations at both YAPC'19100 and TPC 4.0.

It is proposed that the any, all, and eigenstates operators proposed in those talks be added to Perl 6. Adding them to the core is suggested because the use of superpositions changes the nature of subroutine and operator invocations that have superpositions as arguments. This is currently impossible to reproduce in a module. Furthermore, the fundamental utility of being able to write:

        if (any(@value) < 10) { ... }

or:

        die unless all(@tests)->($data);

ought to be available to all Perl users.

Inclusion in the core would also allow the current module-based pure Perl implementation to be greatly optimized (perhaps even parallelized on suitable SIMD or other multiprocessing platforms).

A paper proposing the full semantics of superpositions (including their effect when used as subroutine arguments and operator operands) will soon be available from:

        http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/#Superpositions

MIGRATION ISSUES

The <any> and <all> functions may collide with existing user-defined or module-exported subroutine names.

IMPLEMENTATION

See the Quantum::Superpositions module.

REFERENCES

 [1] Bohr, N., On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules, Philosophical
     Magazine, s.6, v.24, pp.1-25, 1913.

 [2] Einstein, A., †ber einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes
     betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt ("On a Heuristic Viewpoint
     Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light"), Annalen
     der Physik, v.17, p.132-148, 1905.

 [3] Lewis, G.N., The Conservation of Photons, Nature, v.118(2),
     pp.874-875, 1926.

 [4] Monroe, C., Meekhof, D.M., King, B.E., Itano, W.M. & Wineland, D.J.
     Demonstration of a Fundamental Quantum Logic Gate, Phys. Rev. Lett.
     v.75, pp.4714-4717, 1995.

 [7] Cirac, J.I. & Zoller P., Quantum Computations with Cold Trapped
     Ions, Phys. Rev. Lett. v.74, pp.4091-4096, 1995.

 [8] Gershenfeld, N. & Chuang, I. L. Bulk Spin-resonance Quantum
     Computation, Science v.275, pp.350-356, 1997.

 [9] Cory, D.G., Fahmy, A.F. & Havel, T.F., Ensemble Quantum
     Computing by NMR Spectroscopy, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 94,
     pp.1634-1639, 1997.

[10] Deutsch, D. Quantum Theory, the Church-Turing Principle and the Universal Quantum Computer, Proc. R. Soc. Lond., v.A400, pp.97-117, 1985.

[11] Deutsch, D. & Jozsa, R., Rapid Solution of Problems by Quantum Computation, Proc. R. Soc. Lond., v.A439, pp. 553-558, 1992.

[12] Shor, P. Algorithms for Quantum Computation: Discrete Logarithms and Factoring, Proc. 35th Symp. on Found'ns of Computer Science, pp. 124-134, 1994.

[13] Grover, L.K., A Fast Quantum Mechanical Algorithm for Database Search, Proc. 28'th ACM Symp. on the Theory of Computing, pp. 212-219, 1996.

[14] Wallace, J., Quantum Computer Simulators - A Review, Technical Report 387, School of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Exeter, June 1999.