In classical computation, a "write-only memory" (WOM) is little more than an
oxymoron, and the addition of WOM to a (deterministic or probabilistic)
classical computer brings no advantage. We prove that quantum computers that
are augmented with WOM can solve problems that neither a classical computer
with WOM nor a quantum computer without WOM can solve, when all other resource
bounds are equal. We focus on realtime quantum finite automata, and examine the
increase in their power effected by the addition of WOMs with different access
modes and capacities. Some problems that are unsolvable by two-way
probabilistic Turing machines using sublogarithmic amounts of read/write memory
are shown to be solvable by these enhanced automata.Comment: 32 pages, a preliminary version of this work was presented in the 9th
International Conference on Unconventional Computation (UC2010