Review of quantum computation

Digital computers are machines that can be programmed to perform logical and arithmetical operations. Contemporary digital computers are ''universal,'' in the sense that a program that runs on one computer can, if properly compiled, run on any other computer that has access to enough memory space and time. Any one universal computer can simulate the operation of any other; and the set of tasks that any such machine can perform is common to all universal machines. Since Bennett's discovery that computation can be carried out in a non-dissipative fashion, a number of Hamiltonian quantum-mechanical systems have been proposed whose time-evolutions over discrete intervals are equivalent to those of specific universal computers. The first quantum-mechanical treatment of computers was given by Benioff, who exhibited a Hamiltonian system with a basis whose members corresponded to the logical states of a Turing machine. In order to make the Hamiltonian local, in the sense that its structure depended only on the part of the computation being performed at that time, Benioff found it necessary to make the Hamiltonian time-dependent. Feynman discovered a way to make the computational Hamiltonian both local and time-independent by incorporating the direction of computation in the initial condition. In Feynman's quantum computer, the program is a carefully prepared wave packet that propagates through different computational states. Deutsch presented a quantum computer that exploits the possibility of existing in a superposition of computational states to perform tasks that a classical computer cannot, such as generating purely random numbers, and carrying out superpositions of computations as a method of parallel processing. In this paper, we show that such computers, by virtue of their common function, possess a common form for their quantum dynamics