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Summary: Physics from Computer Science
-- a position statement --
SAMSON ABRAMSKY1
, BOB COECKE1
Oxford University Computing Laboratory, UK
Received 17 December 2005; In final form 17 March 2006
In this statement we provide some examples of transdisciplinary
journeys, from one field to another, and back. In particular, the
quantum informatic endeavor is not just a matter of feeding phys-
ical theory into the general field of natural computation, but also
one of using high-level methods developed in Computer Science
to improve on the quantum physical formalism itself, and the
understanding thereof. We highlight a seemingly contradictory
phenomenon: passing to an abstract, categorical quantum infor-
matic formalism leads directly to a simple and elegant graphical
formulation of quantum theory itself, which for example makes
the design of some important quantum informatic protocols com-
pletely transparent. It turns out that essentially all of the quan-
tum informatic machinery can be recovered from this graphical
calculus. But in turn, this graphical formalism provides a bridge
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