Lab Lunch: 20 April 2021 - Robin Kaarsgaard

Title: The Secretly Reversible Life of Quantum and Classical Computations

Abstract: 

Reversible computation concerns computations that can be “undone” at each step, and has seen applications in diverse areas such as low-power computing, debugging, and even robotics. Reversible computation is also foundationally important in both classical and quantum computing. In this talk, I give a brief overview of the foundational role of reversibility in classical and quantum computation, and relate it to recent work showing that categories of irreversible classical and quantum computations arise as completions of categories of reversible such. This construction makes clear how, semantically, irreversible computations arise as equivalence classes of reversible ones.