This library provides functions for optimizing classical circuits. It is intended to reduce the size of automatically-generated circuits, such as those that are built using Quipper's build_circuit keyword.

Note: the resulting circuit is not expected to be optimal in absolute terms. In general, finding the smallest possible circuit to represent a given boolean function is an NP-hard problem. Rather, we transform the input circuit by applying a number of heuristics and an algebraic optimization technique. This results in the removal of redundant qubits and gates that are typical for machine-generated circuits. It generally decreases the number of gates and ancillas.

For example, consider the circuit for a simple adder, as generated by the build_circuit mechanism:

The optimized version, as generated by simplify_classical, looks like this:

The above example can be found in the file Quipper/Demos/OptimTest.hs in the quipper-demos package.