Computer Scientist's and Programmer's View on Quantum Algorithms: Mapping Functions' APIs and Inputs to Oracles

Quantum Computing (QC) is a promising approach which is expected to boost the development of new services and applications. Specific addressable problems can be tackled through acceleration in computational time and advances with respect to the complexity of the problems, for which QC algorithms can support the solution search. However, QC currently remains a domain that is strongly dominated by a physics' perspective. Indeed, in order to bring QC to industrial grade applications we need to consider multiple perspectives, especially the one of software engineering and software application/service programming. Following this line of thought, the current paper presents our computer scientist's view on the aspect of black-box oracles, which are a key construct for the majority of currently available QC algorithms. Thereby, we observe the need for the input of API functions from the traditional world of software engineering and (web-)services to be mapped to the above mentioned black-box oracles. Hence, there is a clear requirement for automatically generating oracles for specific types of problems/algorithms based on the concrete input to the belonging APIs. In this paper, we discuss the above aspects and illustrate them on two QC algorithms, namely Deutsch-Jozsa and the Grover's algorithm.