dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaTowards a Theory of Conservative Computing
| Authors | Gianpiero Cattaneo, Gianluca Della Vedova, Alberto Leporati, Roberto Leporini |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | quant-ph/0211085 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0211085 |
Abstract
We extend the notion of conservativeness, given by Fredkin and Toffoli in 1982, to generic gates whose input and output lines may assume a finite number d of truth values. A physical interpretation of conservativeness in terms of conservation of the energy associated to the data used during the computation is given. Moreover, we define conservative computations, and we show that they naturally induce a new NP-complete decision problem. Finally, we present a framework that can be used to explicit the movement of energy occurring during a computation, and we provide a quantum implementation of the primitives of such framework using creation and annihilation operators on the Hilbert space C^d, where d is the number of energy levels considered in the framework.
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"abstract": "We extend the notion of conservativeness, given by Fredkin and Toffoli in\n1982, to generic gates whose input and output lines may assume a finite number\nd of truth values. A physical interpretation of conservativeness in terms of\nconservation of the energy associated to the data used during the computation\nis given. Moreover, we define conservative computations, and we show that they\nnaturally induce a new NP-complete decision problem. Finally, we present a\nframework that can be used to explicit the movement of energy occurring during\na computation, and we provide a quantum implementation of the primitives of\nsuch framework using creation and annihilation operators on the Hilbert space\nC^d, where d is the number of energy levels considered in the framework.",
"arxiv_id": "quant-ph/0211085",
"authors": [
"Gianpiero Cattaneo",
"Gianluca Della Vedova",
"Alberto Leporati",
"Roberto Leporini"
],
"categories": [
"quant-ph"
],
"title": "Towards a Theory of Conservative Computing",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0211085"
},
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"variant": "snapshot-2026-03-01",
"version": "0.1.0"
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