Quantum Memory Power

Quantum computation may seem to be a topic for science fiction, but small quantum computers have existed for several years and larger machines are on the drawing table. These efforts have been fueled by a tantalizing property: while conventional computers employ a binary representation that allows computational power to scale linearly with resources at best, quantum computations employ quantum phenomena that can interact to allow computational power that is exponential in the number of "quantum bits" in the system. Quantum devices rely on the ability to control and manipulate binary data stored in the phase information of quantum wave functions that describe the electronic states of individual atoms or the polarization states of photons.

By the year 2020, the basic memory components of a computer will be the size of individual atoms. At such scales, the current theory of computation will become invalid. "Quantum computing" is reinventing the foundations of computer science and information theory in a way that is consistent with quantum physics - the most accurate model of reality currently known. Remarkably, this theory predicts that quantum computers can perform certain tasks breathtakingly faster than classical computers – and, better yet, can accomplish mind-boggling feats such as teleporting information, breaking supposedly "unbreakable" codes, generating true random numbers, and communicating with messages that betray the presence of eavesdropping.

This book explores the combination of Reinforcement Learning and Quantum Computing in the light of complex attacker-defender scenarios. Reinforcement Learning has proven its capabilities in different challenging optimization problems and is now an established method in Operations Research. However, complex attacker-defender scenarios have several characteristics that challenge Reinforcement Learning algorithms, requiring enormous computational power to obtain the optimal solution.