Quantum Symbolic Execution

Abstract: With advances in quantum computing, researchers can now write and run many quantum programs. However, there is still a lack of effective methods for debugging quantum programs. In this paper, quantum symbolic execution (QSE) is proposed to generate test cases, which helps to finding bugs in quantum programs. The main idea of quantum symbolic execution is to find the suitable test cases from all possible ones (i.e. test case space). It is different from the way of classical symbol execution, which gets test cases by calculating instead of searching. QSE utilizes quantum superposition and parallelism to store the test case space with only a few qubits. According to the conditional statements in the debugged program, the test case space is continuously divided into subsets, subsubsets and so on. Elements in the same subset are suitable test cases that can test the corresponding branch in the code to be tested. QSE not only provides a possible way to debug quantum programs, but also avoids the difficult problem of solving constraints in classical symbolic execution.