Somma, R.
, Boixo, S.
, Barnum, H.
and Knill, E.
(2008),
Quantum Simulations of Classical Annealing Processes, Physical Review Letters
(Accessed December 17, 2025)
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Quantum Simulations of Classical Annealing Processes
Published
Author(s)
Rolando Somma, S. Boixo, Howard Barnum,
Abstract
We describe a quantum algorithm that solves combinatorial optimization problems by quantum simulation of a classical simulated annealing process. Our algorithm exploits quantum walks and the quantum Zeno effect induced by evolution randomization. It requires order 1/sqrt(delta) steps to find an optimal solution with bounded error probability, where delta is the minimum spectral gap of the stochastic matrices used in the classical annealing process. This is a quadratic improvement over the order 1/delta steps required by the latter.Citation
Physical Review Letters
Volume
101
Pub Type
Journals
Keywords
quantum computing, quantum algorithms, Monte Carlo Markov chains, simulated annealing
Citation
Issues
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Created September 25, 2008, Updated October 12, 2021