Quantum Computing for Binary Optimization and Beyond: Bridging Classical and Quantum Landscapes
Date:
Talk summary
In this talk, I introduce quantum computing and discuss through adiabatic and universal paradigms its capabilities in solving challenging Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems. While classical methods often struggle with such hard combinatorial problems, Adiabatic Quantum Computers (AQC) excel at solving them, inspiring even new mappings of practical optimization problems to QUBO forms. I will present an algorithm for rigid point-sets registration using AQC. Moving to universal quantum computing, I will introduce Variational Quantum Computing (VQC). VQC involves a hybrid quantum-classical computational loop, where a quantum computer executes only some specific, ideally quantum-native tasks, and a classical computer runs an optimization procedure to optimize over some objective function. A significant class of variational quantum objective functions allows the evaluation of their exact analytical gradients, enabling the use of gradient-based solvers. I will go over the possibility of solving QUBO problems with VQC. [Slides]