arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to David R. Mitchell.
It is found that the statistical level fluctuations of the AQC 3-SAT problem undergo a transition from a poisson (regular) fluctuation form to a form consistent with the predictions of Random Matrix Theory. We present data which suggests this transition correlates with the computational phase transition in the classical 3-SAT problem. Application to Gaussian Processes and implication for experiment is discussed.
We solve the brachistochrone problem for a particle travelling through a spherical mass distribution of uniform density. We examine the connection between this problem and the popular "gravity elevator" result. The solution is compared to the well known brachistochrone problem of a particle in a uniform gravitational field.
We present a new approach to quantum computation involving the geometric phase. In this approach, an entire computation is performed by adiabatically evolving a suitably chosen quantum system in a closed circuit in parameter space. The problem solved is the determination of the solubility of a 3-SAT Boolean Satisfiability problem. The problem of non-adiabatic transitions to higher levels is addressed in several ways. The avoided level crossings are well defined and the interpolation can be slowed in this region, the Hamiltonian can be scaled with problem dimension resulting in a constant gap size and location, and the prescription here is sufficiently general as to allow for other suitably chosen Hamiltonians. Finally, we show that with $n$ applications of this approach, the geometric phase based quantum computation method may be used to find the solution to the 3-SAT problem in $n$ variables, a member of the NP-complete complexity class.
We present an analysis of the quantum adiabatic algorithm for solving hard instances of 3-SAT (an NP-complete problem) in terms of Random Matrix Theory (RMT). We determine the global regularity of the spectral fluctuations of the instantaneous Hamiltonians encountered during the interpolation between the starting Hamiltonians and the ones whose ground states encode the solutions to the computational problems of interest. At each interpolation point, we quantify the degree of regularity of the average spectral distribution via its Brody parameter, a measure that distinguishes regular (i.e., Poissonian) from chaotic (i.e., Wigner-type) distributions of normalized nearest-neighbor spacings. We find that for hard problem instances, i.e., those having a critical ratio of clauses to variables, the spectral fluctuations typically become irregular across a contiguous region of the interpolation parameter, while the spectrum is regular for easy instances. Within the hard region, RMT may be applied to obtain a mathematical model of the probability of avoided level crossings and concomitant failure rate of the adiabatic algorithm due to non-adiabatic Landau-Zener type transitions. Our model predicts that if the interpolation is performed at a uniform rate, the average failure rate of the quantum adiabatic algorithm, when averaged over hard problem instances, scales exponentially with increasing problem size.