English

A Numerical Study of the Performance of a Quantum Adiabatic Evolution Algorithm for Satisfiability

Quantum Physics 2007-05-23 v1 Computational Complexity

Abstract

Quantum computation by adiabatic evolution, as described in quant-ph/0001106, will solve satisfiability problems if the running time is long enough. In certain special cases (that are classically easy) we know that the quantum algorithm requires a running time that grows as a polynomial in the number of bits. In this paper we present numerical results on randomly generated instances of an NP-complete problem and of a problem that can be solved classically in polynomial time. We simulate a quantum computer (of up to 16 qubits) by integrating the Schrodinger equation on a conventional computer. For both problems considered, for the set of instances studied, the required running time appears to grow slowly as a function of the number of bits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0007071,
  title  = {A Numerical Study of the Performance of a Quantum Adiabatic Evolution Algorithm for Satisfiability},
  author = {Edward Farhi and Jeffrey Goldstone and Sam Gutmann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0007071},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

15 pages, 8 figures, LaTeX with BoxedEPS macros; email to [email protected]