  Classical electromagnetic fields and quantum mechanics -- both obey the
principle of superposition alike. This opens up many avenues for simulation of
a large variety of phenomena and algorithms, which have hitherto been
considered quantum mechanical. In this paper, we propose two such applications.
In the first, we introduce a new class of beams, called equivalent optical
beams, in parallel with equivalent states introduced in [Bharath & Ravishankar,
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.89.062110]. These beams have the same
information content for all practical purposes. Employing them, we show how to
transfer information from one degree of freedom of classical light to another,
without any need for classically entangled beams. Next, we show that quantum
machine learning can be performed with OAM beams through the implementation of
a quantum classifier circuit. We provide explicit protocols and explore the
possibility of their experimental realization.
