Quipper: Concrete Resource Estimation in Quantum Algorithms

Abstract: Despite the rich literature on quantum algorithms, there is a surprisingly small amount of coverage of their concrete logical design and implementation. Most resource estimation is done at the level of complexity analysis, but actual concrete numbers (of quantum gates, qubits, etc.) can differ by orders of magnitude. The line of work we present here is a formal framework to write, and reason about, quantum algorithms. Specifically, we designed a language, Quipper, with scalability in mind, and we are able to report actual resource counts for seven non-trivial algorithms found in the quantum computer science literature.