Algorithms For the Near Quantum Computing Era

Since Peter Shor showed in the mid-nineties that quantum computers would be able to solve certain important computational problems much  faster than classical computers, scientists, entrepreneurs and governments have embraced the quest of turning quantum computing a reality. After nearly three decades of collective efforts, it is safe to say that we have reached a near-quantum era.

On the one hand, small scale quantum computing devices have been successfully constructed by several research teams around the globe.

On the other hand, fundamental engineering challenges that arise in the way of scalability of these quantum computing devices suggest that we are still a couple of decades away from seeing the large-scale, general-purpose quantum computers become a reality.Still, most algorithms studied so far in the context of quantum computing will only be able to outperform their classical counterparts when quantum computers capable of performing computation involving the application of thousands quantum operations are available.

The goal of this project is to develop a hybrid classical/quantum algorithmic theory that will allow us to leverage on the power of existing, low complexity, quantum computational devices to boost the power of classical algorithms.