The Classical Boundary of Quantum Computation: History-Resolved Causal Stochastic Machines and the Cost of Classicalization

arXiv:2610.22750v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What separates quantum computation from classical computation when a classical model may retain every branch history and arbitrary causal memory? We study this question using history-resolved causal stochastic machines (HCSMs), which describe positive causal history laws. Probabilistic Turing machines (PTMs) embed in stochastic-ensemble models (SEnMs), which in turn embed in HCSMs. We prove that HCSM history laws coincide exactly with the fixed-basis, prefix-preserving diagonal sector of ideal quantum processes, denoted by $\mathsf{PTM}_{\rm proc}$ and distinguished here from algorithmic quantum Turing machines (QTMs). Coherent quantum processes extend strictly beyond this sector. The boundary is already visible in reversibility. Born-probability shadows of unitary gates preserve inverse composition exactly for basis permutations with phases. Outside this class, an exact positive stochastic simulation that supports universal quantum continuations must retain predictive information absent from visible probabilities. An inverse-recovery identity quantifies this phase ledger, and universal continuation forces the retained probability law to be tomographically sufficient for the quantum state. Under continuous full-state encoding assumptions, this requirement yields quantum-state dimension lower bounds. The familiar slogan $\mathsf{PTM}\subseteq\mathsf{QTM}$ is thereby sharpened into a precise classical boundary and a no-free-classicalization principle. Complete classical branching does not remove the predictive information needed to represent quantum coherence.