Computing with Coloured Tangles

Abstract

We suggest a diagrammatic model of computation based on an axiom of distributivity. A diagram of a decorated coloured tangle, similar to those that appear in low dimensional topology, plays the role of a circuit diagram. Equivalent diagrams represent bisimilar computations. We prove that our model of computation is Turing complete, and that with bounded resources it can moreover decide any language in complexity class IP, sometimes with better performance parameters than corresponding classical protocols.