Machine Learning Theory and Applications

5Machine Learning Algorithms in Quantum Computing

Photo by Annamária Borsos

The idea of designing and developing quantum computers first emerged in the early 1980s under the impetus of physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. While a “classical” computer operates with bits of values 0 or 1, a quantum computer uses the fundamental properties of quantum physics and relies on “quantum bits (qubits).” Beyond this technological feat, quantum computing opens the way to processing computational tasks whose complexity is beyond the reach of our current computers.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the theories of so‐called classical physics were unable to explain certain problems observed by physicists. Therefore, they had to be reformulated and enriched. With the impetus of scientists, physics evolved in the first place toward a “new mechanics” that would become “wave mechanics” and finally “quantum mechanics.”

Quantum mechanics is the mathematical and physical theory that describes the fundamental structure of matter and the evolution in time and space of phenomena on a microscopic scale. An essential notion of quantum mechanics is the “wave–particle duality.” Until the 1890s, physicists considered that the world was composed of two types of objects or particles: those that have mass (such as electrons, protons, neutrons, and atoms) and those that do not (such as ...