Speeding up Robots through Quantum Mechanics

The importance of artificial intelligence has been increasing in many areas. A team of researchers led by Hans Briegel has now shown that quantum physics may help AI agents to speed up decision making processes that are based on previous experience. This also provides a quadratic speed-up for active learning in situations where the agent actively explores its environment. Robots and autonomous machines are assuming an ever increasing range of tasks in our society. Future artificial agents need to be increasingly flexible and work intelligently by learning from previous experience, and they should be able to react autonomously to their environment. The more complex the environment the longer it takes the agent to compare a situation to previous experiences and come to a conclusion on how to respond. "Our agent model comes to a rational conclusion faster because, by using quantum physics, it is, in a manner of speaking, able to recall previous experiences simultaneously, searching for the best action," reports physical theorist Hans Briegel from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Innsbruck.