CHAOS 20, 037114 2010

Nature computes: Information processing in quantum dynamical systems

Karoline Wiesnera
School of Mathematics, Centre for Complexity Sciences, University of Bristol, BS8 1TW Bristol, United Kingdom

Received 3 July 2010; accepted 1 September 2010; published online 28 September 2010 Nature intrinsically computes. It has been suggested that the entire universe is a computer, in particular, a quantum computer. To corroborate this idea we require tools to quantify the information processing. Here we review a theoretical framework for quantifying information processing in a quantum dynamical system. So-called intrinsic quantum computation combines tools from dynamical systems theory, information theory, quantum mechanics, and computation theory. We will review how far the framework has been developed and what some of the main open questions are. On the basis of this framework we discuss upper and lower bounds for intrinsic information storage in a quantum dynamical system. 2010 American Institute of Physics. doi:10.1063/1.3491238 A quantum system can be considered as a computer, storing and processing information during every physical process, be it alignment in spin systems, phase transitions, or chemical bond formation. The amount of matter and energy in the system puts a limit on the amount of computation it can perform and at what speed. What remains unclear is how to quantify the information stored and processed by a given system without knowing the exact number of particles, the exact energy, or other important parameters. If we do not have that informationand in most cases we dontwe need a different way to quantify the information being stored and processed. This question is particularly difcult to answer for quantum systems which are not observable with the naked eye. Here, we will review how a synthesis of dynamical systems theory, information theory, physics, and computation theory leads to methods for analysis of how quantum processes store and manipulate informationwhat we refer to as intrinsic quantum computation. We will see that the framework of intrinsic (quantum) computation provides a lower limit for the information stored by a given quantum dynamical system and an upper limit for the information required to perform a given observed intrinsic computation. tem without knowing the exact number of particles, the exact energy, or other important parameters. If we do not have that informationand in most cases we dontwe need a different way to quantify the information being stored and processed by a given system. Formal language theory6 provides a key to understanding information processing in natural systems. One of the main tasks in computation theory is to recognize a languagethat is, to classify any given string as to whether or not it is a member of the set. The difculty of this task is quantied by associating a language with different types of machines, or automata, that can perform the classication task.7 The language of a natural system is the set of behaviors it exhibits, any forbidden/nonobserved word indicating a rule in the language. To lay the foundations for a computational perspective on quantum dynamical systems a class of quantum mechanical nite-state automata was introduced.8 These automata generate a process language in the following sense. Consider the temporal evolution of the state of some quantum system monitored by a series of measurements numbers registered in some way. Each such measurement can be taken as a random variable. The distribution over sequences of these random variables is what we refer to as a process language. An important question for understanding the structure of natural systems is what kinds of process languages are produced? The relationship between automata and languages is the key to analyze intrinsic computation. The intrinsic computation is then represented by the quantum automaton which generates the process language representing the measurement sequence of the quantum dynamical system at hand. We review some of the theory behind these generating automata and related information-theoretic quantities. Here, we will review how a synthesis of dynamical systems theory, information theory, physics, and computation theory leads to methods for analysis of how quantum processes store and manipulate informationwhat we refer to as intrinsic quantum computation. We will see that the framework of intrinsic quantum computation provides a lower limit for the information stored by a given quantum
2010 American Institute of Physics

I. INTRODUCTION

It has been known for several decades that quantum systems allow for new types of computation and that, indeed they allow for more powerful information processing compared to classical systems.1,2 There is an increasing effort to implement computational operations on quantum devices using their quantum properties explicitly see, e.g., Ref. 3 . Recently, Lloyd4,5 estimated the computational capacity amount of memory and computational speed of the universethe biggest existing physical systemfrom fundamental physical principles. What remains unclear is how to quantify the computational capacity of a given quantum sysa

Electronic mail: k.wiesner@bristol.ac.uk.

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dynamical system and an upper limit for the information required to perform a given observed intrinsic computation.
II. OUTLINE

The paper is organized as follows. We will give a brief overview of related approaches to information generation of quantum dynamical systems and their shortcomings in the context of natural computation. We then give an introduction to quantum nite-state automata and information measures applied to the languages generated by these. No advanced knowledge of quantum mechanics or information theory will be assumed. By no means will we attempt to give a complete summary of the underlying denitions and theorems. For all mathematical details we refer the interested reader to Refs. 810 and other references given in the text. The purpose of this article is to put the tools for intrinsic quantum computation developed so far in the context of the idea that nature computes. We will illustrate that the tools at hand do provide upper and lower bounds for the information required to perform a given intrinsic computation. In other words, for any given observed quantum dynamical system we can compute a lower bound for how much information the system stores and we can nd an upper bound for the information needed for a given observed intrinsic computation. Throughout the article we assume discrete computation as opposed to other contributions to this special issue. We will conclude with discussing some of the open questions in intrinsic quantum computation. In the following we will use the terms intrinsic quantum computation and intrinsic computation of a quantum dynamical system synonymously since we focus on dynamical systems. The tools of intrinsic quantum computation do apply to a more general set of systems and observations separated by time or space.
III. RELATED APPROACHES A. Dynamical systems

ment sequence is a one-time measurement, whereas Beck and Graudenz consider a low-dimensional system measured repeatedly. Alicki and Fannes provide expressions for channel capacities and entropy rates. If we wanted to use this framework to analyze the information generation of a physical system over time we would need to use the channel multiple times while recycling the output of each channel use as the next input. Such multiple use is not considered by Alicki and Fannes.
B. Quantum computation

The rst attempt to provide an information-theoretic description of an individual quantum system under repeated observation was made by Beck and Graudenz.11 By dening symbolic dynamics for repeatedly measured quantum systems, they found closed-form expressions for Renyi entropies of the symbolic sequences. Comparing these entropy expressions for particular example systems, they found that symbolic sequences from measurements of quantum systems can have the same signature of chaotic behavior as sequences generated by classical chaotic maps under symbolic dynamics. In the current context it is important to point out that no further analysis was made of the word distributions or correlations in the generated sequences. Later, Alicki and Fannes introduced symbolic dynamics for quantum systems providing a somewhat broader framework see Refs. 12 and 13 and references therein . They considered an input of an innite string of symbols, communicated by an innite-dimensional quantum dynamical system a C algebra and an output of an innite string of symbols. The innite-dimensional quantum state responsible for the information generation is evolved forward for one time step and then measured. Hence, the resulting measure-

There is a growing body of theoretical results suggesting that a computational device whose components are directly governed by quantum physics may be considerably more powerful than its classical counterpart. The most celebrated of these results is Shors quantum algorithm for factoring large integers from 1994.14 Other results include Grovers quantum algorithm for accelerating combinatorial searches from 1996,15 quantum cryptography for secure communication,16,17 and, more recently, an algorithm for numerically solving linear systems of equations.18 These results assume the use of powerful computational architectures, such as quantum Turing machines,2 that are decidedly more powerful than nite-state machines. So far experimental tests of quantum computation are nitein fact, very nite. Currently, the largest coherent system of information storage is 7 quantum bits or qubits.19 For a review of theoretical and experimental studies of quantum computation see, for example, Ref. 20. There is a general phenomenon that a classical statistical mechanical system in N dimensions can be mapped to a quantum statistical system in N 1 dimensions. The canonical example of this is the two-dimensional classical Ising system which can be recast as a system of interacting fermions in one dimension. The computational completeness of classical and quantum Ising systems is of continued interest see, e.g., Refs. 3 and 21 . We do not aim to give an overview of the eld of quantum computation. What matters in this context is that the two eldsquantum computation and intrinsic quantum computationhave very different aims. Where the former is concerned with nding algorithms and implementations for computational purposes such as computing the Fourier transform of a given input, the goal of the latter is to identify the type of computation taking place in a natural system in its natural environment. How to harvest this computational capacity is one of the open questions of the eld. We now give an overview of the tools developed for analyzing intrinsic quantum computation.
IV. INTRINSIC QUANTUM COMPUTATION

Intrinsic computation in a dynamical system is an inherent process, it generates the behavior of the system.22 One asks three basic questions of the system. First, how much historical information is stored in the current state? Second, in what architecture is that information stored? Finally, how is the stored information transformed to produce future behavior? This approach has been used to analyze intrinsic

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computation in classical dynamical systems, statistical mechanical systems, and stochastic processes.2326 Intrinsic quantum computation is a direct extension of this prior work and, also, complementary to the design and theoreticalengineering approach to quantum computation mentioned in Sec. III B.8
A. Quantum dynamical systems

its process language, and the corresponding quantum generator.

C. Measuring information processing

In principle, the phase space of a quantum dynamical system is given by its Hilbert space H, the time evolution is governed by the Schrdinger equation, and the measurement process is formulated in terms of suitable projection operators see, for example, Ref. 27 . Given a system prepared in a state , it is possible to calculate the probability for the sequence of L measurement results sL, s , given an observable and the time difference between the measurements. The mapping from phase space to the space of symbol seis called symbolic dynamics.28 For a given time quence evolution and observable which corresponds to the partition in classical symbolic dynamics usually not all possible sequences of symbols occur: there are allowed and forbidden sequences or words. The set of allowed words together with their probability normalized for each word length constitutes the process language of the quantum system.
B. Quantum nite-state automata

We can use the observed behavior reected in the measurement sequence to come to a number of conclusions about how a quantum dynamical system stores and processes information. The following is a summary of results from Ref. 9. The Shannon entropy of length-L sequences is dened as HL
sL AL

Pr sL log2 Pr sL .

It measures the average surprise in observing the event sL. Reference 29 showed that a stochastic processs informational properties can be derived systematically by taking derivatives and then integrals of H L as a function of L. For example, the source entropy rate h is the rate of increase with respect to L of the Shannon entropy in the large-L limit, h lim H L H L 1 ,
L

where the units are bits/measurement.30 The entropy rate h quanties the irreducible randomness in measurement sequences produced by a dynamical system: the randomness that remains after the correlations and structures in longer and longer sequences are taken into account. The entropy rate can be calculated directly and in closed form from the quantum-automaton representation,9
Q 1 Q 1

A quantum nite-state automaton in its most general form takes in classical information, processes it using quantum mechanical resources, and outputs classical information. We will only review the general concepts here. For the mathematical details we refer the reader to Ref. 8. A quantum nite-state machine has a set of possible inputs the input alphabet , a set of outputs the output alphabet , and a transition matrix specifying the conditional probability amplitudes of a particular output given a particular input and a quantum state of the machine. Any quantum measurement can be represented as such an automaton. The input alphabet is the set of measurement operations which are allowed, the output alphabet is the set of measurement outcomes neither are necessarily nite alphabets , and the conditional probability amplitudes summarized in the transition matrix are given by the inner product between initial quantum state of the machine, measurement operator, and nal quantum state of the machine. A simplied version of this quantum nite-state automaton with inputs and outputs is a quantum generator. A quantum generator does not take any varied input but merely produces as output a potentially innite sequence of symbols from some output alphabet. Again, for the details the reader is referred to Ref. 8. A quantum dynamical system under repeated measurement in particular can be represented as such a quantum generator. The choice of measurement operator can be considered as a nonvarying input and hence ignored in the analysis. The output distribution of symbols generated by such an automaton is then equivalent to the process language of the quantum dynamical system. In Sec. IV D we give an example of a quantum dynamical system,

h = Q 1
i=0 j=0

Uij 2log2 Uij 2 ,

where Q is the dimension of the Hilbert space and U is the unitary operator in the basis of the measurement operators. Structure, in turn, is measured by the mutual information30 between a processs past S and its future S, given by the excess entropy E,29 E = I S ;S . 4

The excess entropy, measured in bits, is a central quantity in our discussion of intrinsic quantum computation. The excess entropy and the entropy rate are complementary quantities. The entropy rate is a measure of randomness which in the literature of dynamical systems and information theory is also called a measure of information generation. The excess entropy, on the other hand, is a measure of correlations and hence structure. It is dened as the amount of information stored in a process. The third signicant measure of intrinsic computation is proportional to the size of the nitestate automaton. For classical dynamical systems, there is a known procedure to nd the minimal such automaton generating a given process language.31 The size of the automaton then denes the statistical complexity C of a process. More precisely, the statistical complexity is the Shannon entropy over the state distribution of this automaton.22,23 It is a measure of the minimum amount of information required to generate a given process language. It can be considered to be a computational resource as a function of the number of states needed . The amount of information stored represented by

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E and the amount required to generate a given process represented by C often differ, which is explained in Refs. 32 and 33. A quantum equivalent of the statistical complexity Cq has been dened in Ref. 34. It is the von Neumann entropy over the mixed state of the corresponding quantum automaton. No algorithm exists yet for nding a minimal and optimal quantum nite-state automaton representation.
D. Example

1/2 | 0

A
1/2 | 0 1/2 | 1 1/2 | 1

We now look at an example introduced in Ref. 10. Consider a spin-1 particle subject to a magnetic eld rotating the spin in three-dimensional Hilbert space. The spins x-component is measured with constant time intervals for details we refer to Ref. 10 . Integrating the Schrdinger equation for one time step, the time evolution is given by the following unitary matrix: 1 2 U= 0 1 2 1 2 0 1 2 0 1 0 . 5

1.0 | 1

FIG. 1. The even process quantum generator.

Since all entries are real, U denes a rotation in R3 around the y-axis by angle / 4 followed by a rotation around the x-axis by an angle / 2. Using a suitable representation of the spin operator Jx Ref. 35, p. 199 , 0 0 0 6 Jx = 0 0 i , 0 i 0

we obtain a measurement partition P = J2 , 1 J2 of phase x x space consisting of a projection onto the x-axis and a projection onto the yz-plane. In other words, the measurement answers the yes-no question: Is the square of the spin component in the yz-plane zero? The measurement outcomes corresponding to the two measurement operators are arbitrarily labeled 0 and 1, respectively. Assume that a system is in state t at time t. The time evolution of the quantum system during one time step is then given by the following equation:
t+1

generation of a variety of process languages by one quantum automaton if the measurement protocol is varied.36 The process language generated by this automaton is the so-called even process language.28,37 The word distribution is dened by the innite set of irreducible forbidden words F = 012k10 , k = 1 , 2 , 3 , . . .. That is, if the spin component equals 0 along the x-axis it will be zero an even number of consecutive measurements before being observed to be nonzero. This is a type of innite correlation: for a possibly innite number of time steps the system tracks the evenness or oddness of the number of consecutive measurements of spin component equals 0 along the x-axis. The information measures introduced in Sec. IV C are calculated for the even process as follows. The entropy rate, computed directly from the quantum automaton, is found to be h = 0.667 bits/measurement. The excess entropy E is usually computed numerically but can also be computed from the time-reversed process.32 In case of the even process it can be easily computed from the minimal classical automaton and amounts to 0.902 bits.33 The statistical complexity C is computed from the classical minimal automaton23,31 and amounts to 0.902 bits.8 Hence, the even process is a rare example where E and C are the same.
V. UPPER AND LOWER BOUNDS FOR INTRINSIC INFORMATION PROCESSING

= PU

where renormalization is required at each time step. Here, we use the standard notation for left-multiplication of a matrix P and U with a column vector t in quantum mechanics. The probability of a symbol at time step t + 1 is given by the norm of the state t+1 before renormalization. The time evolution in Eq. 7 uniquely denes a quantum generator.8,10 The resulting automaton for this example is shown in Fig. 1. At each time step the automaton is in one of its states, makes a transition to a new state according to the transition amplitudes labeling the edges, and outputs the symbol labeling the same edge. The automaton is clearly distinguishable from a classical automaton through its negative amplitudes labeling some of the edges. Negative and complex amplitudes lead to superposition of states and the

In the following we use the measures of information introduced above to discuss bounds to the information stored by a quantum dynamical system. For a lower bound consider the excess entropy of the process generated by the system. E is per denition the information stored in the process. It should be clear that any output of a computation requires at least as much input. Hence the system proper which generates the process needs to store at least E bits of information. Hence, the minimum information stored by a quantum dynamical system is given by the excess entropy E of the process language it generates. The statistical complexity C , on the other hand, is a measure of the computational resources needed to generate a process language. It is known that E C .31 A corresponding bound from quantum information theory is the Holevo bound

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for the amount of information accessible given a quantum system.38 Although it is not known yet how to nd Cq we can bound it from above and below. On the one hand, any classical representation can be made into a valid quantum representation albeit a trivial one. This is done by representing every transition of the classical automaton by a general quantum measurement operator.39 This leads to the same number of states and the same probability distribution over them, but no quantum behavior such as superposition of states is possible. On the other hand, there are cases where the quantum resources are fewer than the classical resources required for generating a given process language:34 Cq C . Using the same argument for the information stored as above we obtain the following sequence of inequalities: E Cq C . 8

are acknowledged for a careful review of the manuscript and many helpful suggestions. The Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences is funded by the EPSRC, UK EP/E501214/1 .
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2 1

The former sets a strict lower bound on the intrinsic computation,33 whereas the latter does not imply a strict upper limit on the intrinsic computation. Rather, it implies that the system does not use more computational resources. As shown in Ref. 34 the two bounds are closer together for quantum compared to classical systems.
VI. CONCLUSION AND OPEN QUESTIONS

Considering nature as a quantum computer is gaining more and more attention in the scientic and popular-science literature. Such an idea, albeit very compelling, requires further tools for quantifying the computation. We reviewed the tools developed for intrinsic quantum computation. They include a set of information-theoretic functions measuring the information content of measurement sequences obtained through repeated observation of a quantum system, and they include a computation-theoretic representation of the underlying computation, the so-called quantum generator. The theoretical framework of intrinsic quantum computation is far from complete. An algorithm for constructing the minimal quantum representation has yet to be found. Such an algorithm would yield a quantum analog to the statistical complexity. Also, the analysis so far is conned to time sequences or, equivalently, one-dimensional spatial sequences. Clearly, a lot of structure is higher-dimensional. It would be desirable to have ways to quantify the intrinsic quantum computation necessary to generate higher-dimensional structures. Last but not least, it will be extremely useful to think of ways to harvest the computation of a given quantum dynamical system for computational tasks such as computing Fourier transforms, to mention an example. The step from intrinsic to useful computation has yet to be taken.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the editors of Chaos for their invitation to submit an article. Two anonymous referees

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