quantum_theory.pdf

Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer DAVID DEUTSCH y Appeared in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A 400, pp. 97-117 (1985) (Communicated by R. Penrose, F.R.S. — Received 13 July 1984) Abstract It is argued that underlying the Church-Turing hypothesis there is an implicit physical assertion. Here, this assertion is presented explicitly as a physical prin- ciple: ‘every finitely realizable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means’. Classical physics and the universal Turing machine, because the former is continuous and the latter discrete, do not obey the principle, at least in the strong form above. A class of model computing machines that is the quantum generalization of the class of Tur- ing machines is described, and it is shown that quantum theory and the ‘universal quantum computer’ are compatible with the principle. Computing machines re- sembling the universal quantum computer could, in principle, be built and would have many remarkable properties not reproducible by any Turing machine. These do not include the computation of non-recursive functions, but they do include ‘quantum parallelism’, a method by which certain probabilistic tasks can be per- formed faster by a universal quantum computer than by any classical restriction of it. The intuitive explanation of these properties places an intolerable strain on all interpretations of quantum theory other than Everett’s. Some of the numerous connections between the quantum theory of computat