Benchmarking Differential Evolution on a Quantum Simulator

Abstract

The use of Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) for solving Mathematical/Computational Optimization Problems is inspired by the biological processes of Evolution. Few of the primitives involved in the Evolutionary process/paradigm are selection of ’Fit’ individuals (from a population sample) for retention, cloning, mutation, discarding, breeding, crossover etc. In the Evolutionary Algorithm abstraction, the individuals are deemed to be solution candidates to an Optimization problem and additional solution(/sets) are built by applying analogies to the above primitives (cloning, mutation etc.) by means of evaluating a ’Fitness’ function/criterion. One such algorithm is Differential Evolution(DE) which can be used to compute the minima of functions such as the rastrigin function and rosenbrock function. This work is an attempt to study the result of applying the DE method on these functions with candidate individuals generated on classical Turing modeled computation and comparing the same with those on state of the art Quantum computation.The study benchmarks the convergence of these functions by varying the parameters initialized and reports timing, convergence, and resource utilization results.