Metamorphic Testing of Oracle Quantum Programs

Abstract

Quantum Computing is regarded with a growing sense of excite-ment and expectation. While the preliminary evidences of its prac-tical interest accumulate, there are numerous challenges that must be addressed before quantum computing can reach generalized adoption and realize its full potential. One such challenge concerns assessing whether a quantum program is correct, namely in the sense that it implements the desired functionality. In the classical realm, program testing is a well-established approach to find de-fects in programs. While this approach should inspire quantum software development, porting classical testing techniques to the quantum world is by no means trivial. We propose a novel approach to test quantum programs. Our approach is based on the use of metamorphic relations, which allows us to overcome the well-known quantum measurement problem. We describe a series of exploratory experiments whose results provide evidence of the usefulness of our approach.