Quantomatic
Quantomatic is a diagrammatic proof assistant, meaning it provides machine-support for reasoning with diagrammatic languages (check out some of our papers). It allows users to draw diagrams and build up proofs using diagrammatic rewrite rules. It's easier to show you what that means than to tell you, so download it and try it out!
Download
You can choose between:
- the latest stable release (recommended): From GitHub
- or you can access the source code directly.
Quantomatic requires java to run, which can be downloaded here, or found in your package manager.
Building from source
If you wish to download the source code directly, you will need:
You will then need to clone Quantomatic and build/run the frontend using sbt:git clone git://github.com/Quantomatic/quantomatic.git -b integration cd ./scala sbt run
Note this assumes you want the latest development version. To get source for the latest stable version, remove -b integration
from the git clone
command above. You will see a number of options once sbt run
is complete. Choose QuantoDerive to run the main GUI.
Sample projects
The Using Quantomatic section below gives instructions for getting it up and running with a sample project. This section provides additional sample projects to get you started. The sample projects are now all hosted in the same repository on GitHub.
Not sure what these are? Try the Qubit Zoology for a selection of languages and frameworks.
Stabilizer ZX-calculus project
This contains all of the Stabilizer ZX-calculus axioms and some useful theorems and simplification procedures. It also includes sample graphs and derivations.
Clifford+T ZX-calculus project
This contains all of the Clifford+T ZX-calculus axioms.
Bialgebra project
This project contains the axioms for a (variable-arity) commutative bialgebra and a strongly-normalising simplification procedure.
View all the sample projects on Github
Using Quantomatic
To start experimenting with Quantomatic, download the sample project below and unzip it somewhere on your computer.
Once you have downloaded the sample project, open it in Quantomatic with
File > Open Project...
by selecting (or navigating to) the
directory in the file browser and clicking
Open
. At this point, you should be seeing something like this:
You can change the font size etc. by going to the
Window
menu and choosing
Increase UI scaling
or
Decrease UI scaling
accordingly.
Graph editing
Expand the graphs folder on the left and double-click
sample.qgraph
. This will open the graph editor:
You can interact with this as you would expect: Drag nodes around, copy and paste, use the = and - keys to zoom in and out, etc.. Double-click nodes (or edges) to edit data. One handy trick is to let Quantomatic do some automatic layout for you. Notice how there are a bunch of nodes clustered up in a particularly unhelpful way in the above graph? Try selecting them and holding down the R key to relax the node positions:
That's better! Next, have a look at the tools we have available:
From left-to-right, these are:
Select
,
Add Vertex
,
Add Boundary
,
Add Edge
, and
Edit !-Boxes
. We have already been using the
Select
tool, so click on the
Add Vertex
tool. Notice now the vertex types at the bottom of the screen is now enabled. Pick a vertex type:
Since the sample project is set up for the ZX-calculus, the available types are well...
Z
and
X
. We'll ignore the
<wire>
type for now. Once a type is selected, clicking on the screen will add vertices of that type.
Similar to the vertex tool is the boundary tool. These create dummy vertices which serve as free edges, or boundaries to a graph. These are important for creating rules. Note that these don't become proper inputs/outputs until we connect some edges to them. To do that, try out the edge tool:
Edges are created by clicking and dragging from one vertex to another. They can either be directed or undirected, which
is set by the checkbox in the lower-right corner. Some theories can have multiple types of edges, which you can pick
from the
Edge Type
drop-down, but the ZX-calculus only allows one edge type, so no need to mess with it.
The tool that needs the most explanation is the
Edit !-Box
tool. !-boxes (or "bang-boxes") allow you to mark sub-graphs that can be repeated any number of times. With
the !-box tool selected, click and drag around some vertices to create a new !-box:
To add are remove nodes from a !-box, click and drag from upper-left corner of the !-box to the thing you want to add/remove. This also works for other !-boxes. To nest one !-box inside another, click and drag from the parent's corner to the child's:
Just like with nodes, repeating the process will remove the child !-box from the parent. QuantoDerive tries its best to
only draw !-boxes around nodes that are actually
inside that !-box, but sometimes things can go wrong. For example, if a vertex ends up between two vertices that
are both in a !-box
bx0
, it might appear to be in
bx0
as well. This can get confusing, so QuantoDerive tries to help you out:
The node
v3
above is not actually in
bx0
, so QuantoDerive is giving you a (not-so-subtle) hint to move it somewhere else.
Rule editing
Rule editing is similar, except now we work with two graphs side-by-side:
Here the blue outline shows which graph has the keyboard focus, e.g. for copy-and-paste and
R (relaxing). To make a valid rule, the LHS and RHS should have identical boundaries and !-boxes. Not only should
the numbers match, but also the labels. For example, in the rule above, both sides have two boundary vertices, labelled
b0
and
b1
.
Rules are created by selecting
File > New Axiom
. Soon, you will also be able to create rules from derivations, i.e. theorems.
Starting a derivation
To start a new derivation, open a graph that will serve as a starting point, and select
Derive > Start derivation
.
This opens up the derivation editor. Nothing is happening yet because no rules have been added. Click the
+
button in the
Rewrite
pane to add some rules.
I usually add all of them because...why not? You can also search through your rules using the "Filter" bar at the top. As soon as you add some rules, QuantoDerive will start eagerly searching for matchings:
The more cores your computer has, the more fun this part is! Currently, QuantoDerive will find up to 50 matchings for each
rule, which you can browse through using the left and right arrow buttons. Also note that selecting subgraphs on the
left will refine the search. One you find the rewrite you want, click
Apply
. This will create a proof step, which you can view at any time by clicking on it in the history view:
The piece of graph that was removed is highlighted on the LHS, while the new piece of graph that was added is shown on
the RHS. Rewriting always takes place at the end of a chain of rewrite steps, which is called a
proof head. The derivation editor is designed so that you can try rules out, and if they don't work, you can back
up and try other things without ever losing your work. This means that histories can branch and have multiple heads.
To create a new head, click a rewrite step somewhere in the path, and click the
New Proof Head
button in the toolbar:
Using the simplifier
When you are tired of applying rewrites one at a time, click on a proof head, and switch over the the simplify panel. Notice
there isn't a whole lot to see. That's because we haven't loaded any
simplification
procedures, aka
simprocs yet. These are little pieces of code that define a simplification strategy. On the left, open the
simprocs
folder and double-click
basic-simp.py
:
This one's as basic as they come. It loads a some rules from the project into a list called
simps
, then it will try to apply rules from
simps
until either it runs out of rules to apply, or you stop it. That's what
REDUCE(simps)
does. Click the
button in the toolbar to execute this code, which will
register the procedure
basic-simp
with QuantoDerive. Now, go back to your derivation and click the refresh button:
There it is, ready to go. Select
basic-simp
and click play:
Well, that didn't get us very far. It is basic, after all. Go back to
simprocs
and open
rotate-simp.py
and execute it. Now, back in our derivation, click the refresh button again and run
rotate-simp
.
That's better! Of course, your results may vary depending on what nodes you added earlier.
So, that's pretty much all there is to it. Play around with creating some new rules or even a new project.
The simproc API
Simplification procedures are implemented in Python, via a built-in interpreter in Quantomatic based in jython. The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of python bindings provided by Quantomatic, via the quanto.util.Scripting
object. The API is a work-in-progress, and subject to change and/or expansion as more features from the simplifier are exposed. If you wish to get the most up-to-date look at what bindings are available, have a look at the soure code.
Generally, a simproc file will construct an object extending the class quanto.rewrite.Simproc
, then register it with a name. When this simproc is called from the GUI, it will call the method simp()
, which takes a graph as its input and returns a lazy list of rewrite steps. These steps consist of a new graph, as well as the matched rule which produced it. First some basic functions:
load_rule(path) load a rule located in 'path'. Note this path is relative to the project root, and the .qrule extension should be omitted. load_rules(paths) same, but takes a list of paths and returns a list of rules. In other words, it is shorthand for 'map(load_rule, paths)'. register_simproc(name, simproc) takes a simproc object and registered with the given name. This makes it available in the GUI simplifier. load_graph(path) load a graph located in 'path'. Again this path is relative to the project root, and the .qgraph extension should be omitted. This is rarely used in simprocs, but useful for testing or batch processing. save_graph(graph, path) save a graph to the given 'path'. Paths follow the same rules as above.
The easiest way to construct a simproc object is to chain together some of the simpler, built-in simprocs into more complicated ones. Here's a list of the current built-in simprocs:
EMPTY a trivial simproc which does nothing REWRITE(rules) takes a rule or list of rules and applies the first rule that matches. REWRITE_METRIC(rules, f) takes a rule or list of rules and a function f from graphs to integers. It will apply the first rule that matches *and* (strictly) reduces the value of f. REWRITE_WEAK_METRIC(rules, f) same as above, except the rewrite only needs to be non-increasing on f. REWRITE_TARGETED(rule, v, f) takes a rule, the name of a vertex 'v' within the rule (as a string), and a targeting function 'f' from graphs to a vertex name. It will apply the rule on a graph 'g' by first attempting to match 'v' on 'f(g)', then matching the rest.
Simprocs are combined via two combinators:
s >> t apply simproc 's' until it produces no new rewrites, then apply 't' REPEAT(s) apply simproc 's' until it yields no new rewrites, then repeat until applying 's' yields no rewrites at all.
It is so comment to wrap REWRITE_XXXX
in REPEAT
that certain shorthands have been introduced:
REDUCE(rules) := REPEAT(REWRITE(rules)) REDUCE_METRIC(rules, f) := REPEAT(REWRITE_METRIC(rules, f)) REDUCE_WEAK_METRIC(rules, f) := REPEAT(REWRITE_METRIC(rules, f)) REDUCE_TARGETED(rule, v, f) := REPEAT(REWRITE_TARGETED(rule, v, f))
That's basically it. Since the interpreter is jython
under the hood, simprocs can access all of the data associated with graphs, vertices, etc. Here are a few methods of Quantomatic's Graph
type which are handy for writing metrics or targeting functions:
graph.typeOf(v) returns a string containing the type of the vertex, e.g. 'Z' or 'X' graph.isBoundary(v) returns true if the given vertex is a boundary graph.isAdjacentToType(v, str) returns true if the vertex is adjacent to a vertex of the given type graph.isAdjacentToBoundary(v) returns true if the given vertex is touching the boundary.
A couple of the built-in methods also have wrapper functions that enable more compact and 'pythonic' code to be written:
verts(graph) return a list of vertices in the graph, in a python-iterable format. vertex_angle_is(graph, v, str) returns true if the angle of v is equal to the given string value.
You can see most of these functions in action in the simproc rotate-simp.py
:
Copyright © 2018. Quantomatic project.