Opening the Black Box inside Grover’s Algorithm

Grover’s algorithm is one of the primary algorithms offered as evidence that quantum computers can provide an advantage over classical computers. It involves an “oracle” (external quantum subroutine), which must be specified for a given application and whose internal structure is not part of the formal scaling of the quadratic quantum speedup guaranteed by the algorithm. Grover’’s algorithm also requires exponentially many calls to the quantum oracle (approximately √2𝑛 calls where n is the number of qubits) to succeed, raising the question of its implementation on both noisy and error-corrected quantum computers. In this work, we construct a quantum-inspired algorithm executable on a classical computer that performs Grover’s task in a linear number of calls to (simulations of) the oracle—an exponentially smaller number than Grover’s algorithm—and demonstrate this algorithm explicitly for Boolean satisfiability problems. The complexity of our algorithm depends on the cost to simulate the oracle once, which may or may not be exponential, depending on its internal structure. Indeed, Grover’s algorithm does not have an a priori quantum speedup as soon as one is given access to the “source code” of the oracle, which may reveal an internal structure of the problem. Our findings illustrate this point explicitly, as our algorithm exploits the structure of the quantum circuit used to program the quantum computer to speed up the search. There are still problems where Grover’s algorithm would provide an asymptotic speedup if it could be run accurately for large enough sizes. Our quantum-inspired algorithm provides lower bounds, in terms of the quantum-circuit complexity, for the quantum hardware to beat classical approaches for these problems. These estimates, combined with the unfavorable scaling of the success probability of Grover’s algorithm, which in the presence of noise decays as the exponential of the exponential of the number of qubits, makes a practical speedup unrealistic even under extremely optimistic assumptions of the evolution of both hardware quality and availability.