A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search

This paper applies quantum computing to a mundane problem in information processing and presents an algorithm that is significantly faster than any classical algorithm can be. The problem is this: there is an unsorted database containing N items out of which just one item satisfies a given condition - that one item has to be retrieved. The most efficient classical algorithm for this will look at an average of N/2 items before finding the desired item. The number of steps required by the algorithm of this paper is O(N^1/2).

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