Algorithms | 2020 Best Paper Award—Winner Announced

We are pleased to announce the winners of the Algorithms 2020 Best Paper Award.

The award has been granted to one research article:

• “From the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm to a Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz”
  by Stuart Hadfield, Zhihui Wang, Bryan O’Gorman, Eleanor G. Rieffel, Davide Venturelli and Rupak Biswas
  Volume 12, Issue 2, doi: 10.3390/a12020034

Introduction: Emerging quantum-gate-model devices will enable implementation of a wider variety of algorithms. Of particular interest are heuristics, which require experimentation on quantum hardware for their evaluation and which have the potential to significantly expand the breadth of applications. A leading candidate is the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, which alternates between application of cost and mixing Hamiltonians. We extend this approach to the quantum alternating operator ansatz, with alternation now between more general parameterized families of unitaries. For cases requiring mixing within a desired subspace, refocusing on unitaries rather than Hamiltonians enables more efficient quantum circuit constructions. Such mixers are particularly useful for optimization problems with hard constraints that must always be satisfied, defining a feasible subspace. More efficient implementation will enable earlier exploration of quantum approaches to a wide variety of approximate optimization, exact optimization, and sampling problems. Here, we detail circuit mappings for a diverse set of problems.

The corresponding authors will receive CHF 500 and a chance to publish a paper free of charge in Algorithms in 2021.

We congratulate the winners on their accomplishments. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the nominated researchers of the above exceptional paper for their contributions to Algorithms and thank the Award Committee for voting and helping with the award.