Implementing evolutionary optimization on actual quantum processors

Improving quantum genetic optimization through granular computing

Quantum computers promise to revolutionize the world of computing thanks to some features of quantum mechanics that can enable massive parallelism in computation. This benefit may be particularly relevant in the design of evolutionary algorithms, where the quantum paradigm could support the exploration of multiple regions of the search space in a concurrent way. Although some efforts in this research field are ongoing, the potential of quantum computing is not yet fully expressed due to the limited number of qubits of current quantum processors. This limitation is even more acute when one wants to deal with continuous optimization problems, where the search space is potentially infinite. The goal of this paper is to address this limitation by introducing a hybrid and granular approach to quantum algorithm design, specifically designed for genetic optimization. This approach is defined as hybrid, because it uses a digital computer to evaluate fitness functions, and a quantum processor to evolve the genetic population; moreover, it uses granular computing to hierarchically reduce the size of the search space of a problem, so that good near-optimal solutions can be identified even on small quantum computers. As shown in the experiments, where IBM Q family processors are used, the usage of a granular computation scheme statistically enhances the performance of the state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm implemented on quantum computers, when it is run to optimize well-known benchmark continuous functions.