A quantum walk algorithm can detect the presence of a marked vertex on a graph quadratically faster than the corresponding random walk algorithm (Szegedy, FOCS 2004). However, quantum algorithms that actually find a marked element quadratically faster than a classical random walk were only known for the special case when the marked set consists of just a single vertex, or in the case of some specific graphs. We present a new quantum algorithm for finding a marked vertex in any graph, with any set of marked vertices, that is (up to a log factor) quadratically faster than the corresponding classical random walk, resolving a question that had been open for 15 years.

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doi.org/10.1145/3357713.3384252
Quantum algorithms and applications , Quantum Computation with Bounded Space , WISE Women In Science Excel , Progress in quantum computing:Algorithms, communication, and applications
52nd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2020
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Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam (CWI), The Netherlands

Ambainis, A., Gilyén, A., Jeffery, S., & Kokainis, M. (2020). Quadratic speedup for finding marked vertices by quantum walks. In Proceedings of the Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (pp. 412–424). doi:10.1145/3357713.3384252