This extended abstract reports on on-going research on quantum algorithmic approaches to the problem of generalised tree search that may exhibit effective quantum speedup, even in the presence of non-constant branching factors. Two strategies are briefly summarised and current work outlined.
Abstract. Traditional tree search algorithms supply a blueprint for modeling prob-lem solving behaviour. A diverse spectrum of problems can be formulated in terms of tree search. Quantum computation, in particular Grover’s algorithm, has aroused a great deal of interest since it allows for a quadratic speedup to be obtained in search procedures. In this work we consider the impact of incorporating classical search con-cepts alongside Grover’s algorithm into a hybrid quantum search system. Some of the crucial points examined include: (1) the reverberations of contemplating the use of non-constant branching factors; (2) determining the consequences of incorporating an heuristic perspective into a quantum tree search model.
Mixed Integer Programs (MIPs) model many optimization problems of interest in Computer Science, Operations Research, and Financial Engineering. Solving MIPs is NP-Hard in general, but several solvers have found success in obtaining near-optimal solutions for problems of intermediate size. Branch-and-Cut algorithms, which combine Branch-and-Bound logic with cutting-plane routines, are at the core of modern MIP solvers. Montanaro proposed a quantum algorithm with a near-quadratic speedup compared to classical Branch-and-Bound algorithms in the worst case, when every optimal solution is desired. In practice, however, a near-optimal solution is satisfactory, and by leveraging tree-search heuristics to search only a portion of the solution tree, classical algorithms can perform much better than the worst-case guarantee. In this paper, we propose a quantum algorithm, Incremental-Quantum-Branch-and-Bound, with universal near-quadratic speedup over classical Branch-and-Bound algorithms for every input, i.e., if classical Branch-and-Bound has complexity Q on an instance that leads to solution depth d, Incremental-Quantum-Branch-and-Bound offers the same guarantees with a complexity of O~(Qd). Our results are valid for a wide variety of search heuristics, including depth-based, cost-based, and A∗ heuristics. Universal speedups are also obtained for Branch-and-Cut as well as heuristic tree search. Our algorithms are directly comparable to commercial MIP solvers, and guarantee near quadratic speedup whenever Q≫d. We use numerical simulation to verify that Q≫d for typical instances of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, Maximum Independent Set, and Portfolio Optimization; as well as to extrapolate the dependence of Q on input size parameters. This allows us to project the typical performance of our quantum algorithms for these important problems.
In this work, we investigate quantum tree search via amplitude amplification. Amplitude amplification generalizes Grover's algorithm by replacing the Hadamard initialization with an arbitrary unitary A, with Grover's algorithm recovered as the special case of uniform initialization. We demonstrate the construction of a dynamic search tree of depth m with query complexity (bavg)m where bavg denotes the average branching factor, improving upon the commonly assumed (bmax)m, where bmax is the maximum branching factor. We further challenge the widespread assumption that amplitude amplification is inferior to quantum backtracking. In fact, quantum backtracking is unsuitable for problems that do not naturally admit a backtracking structure; in such cases, amplitude amplification yields improved query complexity. We observe that amplitude amplification constructs the search tree dynamically, rendering its internal structure inaccessible, a constraint that applies equally to quantum backtracking. To address this, we propose sampling-based methods to estimate the tree structure, under the assumption that it approximates a normal distribution with increasing depth. Finally, we introduce a quantum greedy search based on a lookahead heuristic inspired by the classical cognitive architecture Soar, which models human-like problem-solving strategies.