Yale Fan Chooses Harvard

xrCalico23
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:28:32 +0000

Wow.



The Intel ISEF 2010 Grand Award Winners

Yale Wang Fan, Beaverton, OR, USA
Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award Winner

In the not-so-distant future, advanced quantum computing methods could offer exponential savings in time and space over classical computing algorithms.

In his research, Yale Wang Fan, a senior at Catlin Gabel School in Portland, Oregon, demonstrated the power of quantum computing in solving 揘P-complete?(NPC) problems, among the toughest to solve using traditional computing. Fan抯 work offers a highly improved model of adiabatic quantum evolution, a method of solving optimization problems proposed by Farhi et al. of MIT. Recent theoretical work has only studied the performance of simple linear adiabatic evolution on random ensembles of NP-complete problems. However, Fan was able to show numerically that a nonlinear adiabatic path can greatly decrease the time complexity of the algorithm when applied to random hard instances of NP-complete problems, suggesting that the nonlinear adiabatic quantum algorithm can outperform classical algorithms on such ensembles.

Fan抯 work provides new insight into the advanced capabilities of quantum computing, based on theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.



[Intel International Science and Engineering Fair: Winners](Newsroom Home)

Yay for choosing Harvard :).