[Strilanc]

Yes, the post is focusing on the overall effect of operations (unitaries) rather than their continuous trajectories (hamiltonians acting on system via Schrodinger equation) (analogous to working with impulses rather than forces).

To make the continuous case interesting as a compilation problem, you'd need some alternate formulation of the Schrodinger equation, e.g. based on the limit of small powers of unitaries rather than on the matrix exponential, so that deleting i didn't delete literally all processes. Or you could arbitrarily declare real-only hamiltonians are permitted, despite the Schrodinger equation saying "i". But that'd be kinda lame, imo.

(Note: am author of post)

[wasabi991011]

Gidney, that's you?

Huge fan of your work!

I just started my PhD in distributed quantum computing, and my Masters was applying that framework to the QFT.

I came across a number of papers you authored in the process, as well as your blog. In particular, big fan of Kahanamoku-Meyer et al.'s optimistic QFT circuit.

Anyway, keep up the great work!

[prof-dr-ir]

I made a related comment about two years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255476