Conditionals prevent identifying equivalent circuits/DAGs

[kdk]

The circuit identity check does not distinguish between classical wires used as cargs and classical wires used as conditionals, and so the following two circuits are marked as non-equivalent:

>>> import qiskit as qk
>>> qr = qk.QuantumRegister(2)
>>> cr = qk.ClassicalRegister(1)
>>> qc1 = qk.QuantumCircuit(qr, cr)
>>> qc1.h(0).c_if(cr, 0)
>>> qc1.h(1).c_if(cr, 0)
>>> print(qc1)
          ┌───┐
q0_0: |0>─┤ H ├────────
          └─┬─┘  ┌───┐
q0_1: |0>───┼────┤ H ├─
            │    └─┬─┘
         ┌──┴──┐┌──┴──┐
 c0_0: 0 ╡ = 0 ╞╡ = 0 ╞
         └─────┘└─────┘
>>> qc2 = qk.QuantumCircuit(qr, cr)
>>> qc2.h(1).c_if(cr, 0)
>>> qc2.h(0).c_if(cr, 0)
>>> print(qc2)
                 ┌───┐
q0_0: |0>────────┤ H ├─
          ┌───┐  └─┬─┘
q0_1: |0>─┤ H ├────┼───
          └─┬─┘    │
         ┌──┴──┐┌──┴──┐
 c0_0: 0 ╡ = 0 ╞╡ = 0 ╞
         └─────┘└─────┘
>>> qc1 == qc2
False

Since both gates use c0 as a condition, and there is no gate between them which uses c0 as a carg, it should be possible to determine that the order of the two gates on c0 is not important. Ref. test.python.transpiler.test_cx_direction.TestCXDirection.test_preserves_conditions .

[fs1132429]

Update for GoGP

✅ Issue still reproducible as per the original author. The Code:

import qiskit as qk
qr = qk.QuantumRegister(2)
cr = qk.ClassicalRegister(1)
qc1 = qk.QuantumCircuit(qr, cr)
qc1.h(0).c_if(cr, 0)
qc1.h(1).c_if(cr, 0)
print(qc1)

qc2 = qk.QuantumCircuit(qr, cr)
qc2.h(1).c_if(cr, 0)
qc2.h(0).c_if(cr, 0)
print(qc2)

>>> qc1 == qc2
False

The output is still False when we compare both the circuits.

[jakelishman]

The two circuits given in this example are structurally different because of the data dependency flowing along bit 0; without an optimising compiler recognising that these are the same condition and that they can be merged into a single classical check, there's no practical way for the DAG comparison to see these two circuits as equal, because under the IR, they are different.

There's not entirely a problem with conditionals: if I instead make the circuits as

import qiskit as qk
qr = qk.QuantumRegister(2)
cr1 = qk.ClassicalRegister(1)
cr2 = qk.ClassicalRegister(1)
qc1 = qk.QuantumCircuit(qr, cr1, cr2)
qc1.h(0).c_if(cr1, 0)
qc1.h(1).c_if(cr2, 0)
print(qc1)

qc2 = qk.QuantumCircuit(qr, cr1, cr2)
qc2.h(1).c_if(cr2, 0)
qc2.h(0).c_if(cr1, 0)
print(qc2)

then we have qc1 == qc2, despite the re-ordering of the circuits required.

I think that if we use "the bit can't have changed between the conditions" as a requirement, we're opening a separate can of worms - should two circuits compare equal if there's extra explicit quantum no-ops on some of its qubits too? It feels like we're getting into the realm of larger equivalence checkers at that point, which I think is a separate and larger issue than this one.

I propose to close this bug report as "not a bug", and fold its requests into a potential equivalence checker feature request (e.g. #761). In the interests of slimming the issues, I'll just close this pre-emptively, but feel free to re-open if you disagree with me.