Lune

LICS2026Top-tier venue

One Rig to Control Them All

Chris Heunen, Robin Kaarsgaard, Louis Lemonnier

2026Year
2Citations
1Top-tier citations

Abstract

Controlled commands -- computations whose execution depends on a separate input -- play a central role in reversible Boolean circuits and quantum circuits. However, existing formalisms typically treat control only implicitly, entangled with other aspects of computation. From a semantic perspective, control is most naturally expressed in semisimple rig categories, which -- unlike standard circuit models such as props -- support both parallel and conditional composition. We present a construction that freely adjoins an explicit syntactic notion of control to a circuit theory specified as a suitable prop, subject to eight universally quantified equations. Our main result is that these equations are sound and complete for the intended semantics of control: the resulting theory satisfies a universal property, identifying it exactly as the circuit subtheory of the free semisimple rig completion. The proof combines coherence for rig categories with a new method based on induction over Gray codes. We illustrate the usefulness of the framework by showing that it simplifies several existing sound and complete axiomatisations of quantum circuits, isolating a small and conceptually clean set of generators and equations. In addition, the same equations yield a sound and complete axiomatisation of the multiply controlled Toffoli gate set, that is universal for reversible Boolean circuits.

Ask about this paper

Your agent reads all of it.

Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.

Questions to start from

Your agent calls

Luneget_paper_fulltext

Ask in Lune

Free to start. No credit card required.

lune papers fulltext 43480881-b055-4468-94d3-761d6085f26a

Cited by top-tier papers1

Ask how each one uses it

Builds on6

Related papers

Dusk over the sea between two cliffs drawn in fine vertical lines