A quantum speedup algorithm for TSP based on quantum dynamic programming with very few qubits

Abstract

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem that plays a crucial role in combinatorial optimization. In this paper, we are interested in the quantum search framework for the TSP because it has robust theoretical guarantees. However, we need to first search for all Hamiltonian cycles from a very large solution space, which greatly weakens the advantage of quantum search algorithms. To address this issue, one can first prepare a superposition state of all feasible solutions, and then amplify the amplitude of the optimal solution from it. We propose a quantum algorithm to generate the uniform superposition state of all N-length Hamiltonian cycles as an initial state within polynomial gate complexity based on pure quantum dynamic programming with very few ancillary qubits, which achieves exponential acceleration compared to the previous initial state preparation algorithm. As a result, we realized the theoretical minimum query complexity of quantum search algorithms for a general TSP. Compared to some algorithms that theoretically have lower query complexities but lack practical implementation solutions, our algorithm has feasible circuit implementation. Our work provides a meaningful research case on how to fully utilize the structures of specific problems to unleash the acceleration capability of the quantum search algorithms.