Quantum and classical structures in nondeterminstic computation

Abstract

In categorical quantum mechanics, classical structures characterize the classical interfaces of quantum resources on one hand, while on the other hand giving rise to some quantum phenomena. In the standard Hilbert space model of quantum theories, classical structures over a space correspond to its orthonormal bases. In the present paper, we show that classical structures in the category of relations correspond to direct sums of abelian groups. Although relations are, of course, not an interesting model of quantum computation, this result has some interesting computational interpretations. If relations are viewed as denotations of nondeterministic programs, it uncovers a wide variety of non-standard quantum structures in this familiar area of classical computation. Ironically, it also opens up a version of what in philosophy of quantum mechanics would be called an ontic-epistemic gap, as it provides no interface to these nonstandard quantum structures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.