A first-order logic for string diagrams

Equational reasoning with string diagrams provides an intuitive means of proving equations between morphisms in a symmetric monoidal category. This can be extended to proofs of infinite families of equations using a simple graphical syntax called !-box notation. While this does greatly increase the proving power of string diagrams, previous attempts to go beyond equational reasoning have been largely ad hoc, owing to the lack of a suitable logical framework for diagrammatic proofs involving !-boxes. In this paper, we extend equational reasoning with !-boxes to a fully-fledged first order logic called with conjunction, implication, and universal quantification over !-boxes. This logic, called !L, is then rich enough to properly formalise an induction principle for !-boxes. We then build a standard model for !L and give an example proof of a theorem for non-commutative bialgebras using !L, which is unobtainable by equational reasoning alone.Comment: 15 pages + appendi

Encoding !-tensors as !-graphs with neighbourhood orders

Diagrammatic reasoning using string diagrams provides an intuitive language for reasoning about morphisms in a symmetric monoidal category. To allow working with infinite families of string diagrams, !-graphs were introduced as a method to mark repeated structure inside a diagram. This led to !-graphs being implemented in the diagrammatic proof assistant Quantomatic. Having a partially automated program for rewriting diagrams has proven very useful, but being based on !-graphs, only commutative theories are allowed. An enriched abstract tensor notation, called !-tensors, has been used to formalise the notion of !-boxes in non-commutative structures. This work-in-progress paper presents a method to encode !-tensors as !-graphs with some additional structure. This will allow us to leverage the existing code from Quantomatic and quickly provide various tools for non-commutative diagrammatic reasoning.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2015, arXiv:1511.0118

SZX-Calculus: Scalable Graphical Quantum Reasoning

We introduce the Scalable ZX-calculus (SZX-calculus for short), a formal and compact graphical language for the design and verification of quantum computations. The SZX-calculus is an extension of the ZX-calculus, a powerful framework that captures graphically the fundamental properties of quantum mechanics through its complete set of rewrite rules. The ZX-calculus is, however, a low level language, with each wire representing a single qubit. This limits its ability to handle large and elaborate quantum evolutions. We extend the ZX-calculus to registers of qubits and allow compact representation of sub-diagrams via binary matrices. We show soundness and completeness of the SZX-calculus and provide two examples of applications, for graph states and error correcting codes

Verifying the smallest interesting colour code with quantomatic

In this paper we present a Quantomatic case study, verifying the basic properties of the Smallest Interesting Colour Code error detection code

!-Logic: First-order reasoning for families of non-commutative string diagrams

Equational reasoning with string diagrams provides an intuitive method for proving equations between morphisms in various forms of monoidal category. !-Graphs were introduced with the intention of reasoning with infinite families of string diagrams by allowing repetition of sub-diagrams. However, their combinatoric nature only allows commutative nodes. The aim of this thesis is to extend the !-graph formalism to remove the restriction of commutativity and replace the notion of equational reasoning with a natural deduction system based on first order logic. The first major contribution is the syntactic !-tensor formalism, which enriches Penrose’s abstract tensor notation to allow repeated structure via !-boxes. This will allow us to work with many noncommutative theories such as bialgebras, Frobenius algebras, and Hopf algebras, which have applications in quantum information theory. A more subtle consequence of switching to !-tensors is the ability to definitionally extend a theory. We will demonstrate how noncommutativity allows us to define nodes which encapsulate entire diagrams, without inherently assuming the diagram is commutative. This is particularly useful for recursively defining arbitrary arity nodes from fixed arity nodes. For example, we can construct a !-tensor node representing the family of left associated trees of multiplications in a monoid. The ability to recursively define nodes goes hand in hand with proof by induction. This leads to the second major contribution of this thesis, which is !-Logic (!L). We extend previous attempts at equational reasoning to a fully fledged natural deduction system based on positive intuitionistic first order logic, with conjunction, implication, and universal quantification over !-boxes. The key component of !L is the principle of !-box induction. We demonstrate its application by proving how we can transition from fixed to arbitrary arity theories for monoids, antihomomorphisms, bialgebras, and various forms of Frobenius algebras. We also define a semantics for !L, which we use to prove its soundness. Finally, we reintroduce commutativity as an optional property of a morphism, along with another property called symmetry, which describes morphisms which are not affected by cyclic permutations of their edges. Implementing these notions in the !-tensor language allows us to more easily describe theories involving symmetric or commutative morphisms, which we then demonstrate for recursively defined Frobenius algebra nodes