Quantum Intelligence

Abstract

During the last fifty years, a theory of computations has been based upon classical physics implemented by the deterministic Turing machine. However, along with the many successes of digital computers, the existence of so-called hard problems has placed some limitations on their capabilities, since the computational time for such problems grows exponentially as a function of the dimensionality. It was well understood that the only way to fight the “curse” of the combinatorial explosion is to enrich digital computers with analog devices. In contradistinction to a digital computer which performs operations on numbers symbolizing an underlying physical process, an analog computer processes information by exploiting physical phenomena directly, and thereby, it significantly reduces the complexity of the computations. This idea was stressed by Feynman (1982) who demonstrated that the problem of exponential complexity in terms of calculated probabilities can be reduced to a problem of polynomial complexity in terms of simulated probabilities. However, the main disadvantage of analog computers is a lack of universality. This is why the concept of a quantum computer became so attractive: its analog nature is based upon physical simulations of quantum probabilities, and, at the same time, it is universal (at least, for modeling the physical world).