Abstract Storage Devices

A quantum storage device differs radically from a conventional physical storage device. Its state can be set to any value in a certain (infinite) state space, but in general every possible read operation yields only partial information about the stored state. The purpose of this paper is to initiate the study of a combinatorial abstraction, called Abstract Storage Device (ASD), which models deterministic storage devices with the property that only partial information about the state can be read, but that there is a degree of freedom as to which partial information should be retrieved.