Quantum-inspired differential evolution on bloch coordinates of qubits

Abstract

Differential evolution (DE) is a population based evolutionary algorithm widely used for solving multidimensional global optimization problems over continuous spaces. On the other hand, a variation of the original quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QEA), bloch quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (BQEA), is a promising concept which very well suitable for handling global optimization problem of low dimensionality. BQEA applies several quantum computing techniques such as qubit representation based on bloch sphere and rotation gate operator, etc. This paper extends the concept of differential operators to the quantum paradigm and proposes the bloch quantum-inspired differential evolution algorithm (BQDE). The performance of BQDE is found to be significantly superior as compared to BQEA on several benchmark functions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.