A team of researchers that include Silvano Garnerone, an IQC postdoctoral fellow, has shown a quantum speed-up to the PageRank algorithm, a key algorithm utilized by Google for ranking webpages based on their importance in the webgraph.
IQC Postdoctoral Fellow Silvano Garnerone
The researchers have reported their finding in a paper entitled ‘Adiabatic Quantum Algorithm for Search Engine Ranking’ in the journal, Physical Review Letters. Daniel A. Lidar and Paolo Zanardi, researchers at the University of Southern California, and Garnerone are the co-authors of the paper. This finding marks a significant progress in the advancement of quantum algorithms to effectively and rapidly retrieve useful data from a large pool of information.
Garnerone informed that the researchers speculated whether quantum computation could deliver some speed-up in the assessment of structural properties of intricate networks. They believed that the PageRank algorithm was an ideal candidate problem to study.
The researchers demonstrated that a quantum adiabatic computation can be better than the classical method used for assessing the critical part of PageRank. The speed-up is a key development even though it is not exponential, a benefit usually provided by some quantum algorithms.
Garnerone stated that the world wide web is an example of a intricate network. Seeking quantum algorithms capable of performing better than classical methods for this purpose will drive quantum research. These new algorithms gain significance in a world in which the issue is not about the shortage of data but rather to determine a quick and effective way to identify useful data.