Artificial neural network architecture selection in a quantum computer

Miniaturisation of computers components is taking us from classical to quantum physics domain. Further reduction in computer components size eventually will lead to the development of computer systems whose components will be on such a small scale that quantum physics intrinsic properties must be taken into account. The expression quantum computation and a first formal model of a quantum computer were first employed in the eighties. With the discovery of a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than any known classical algorithm in 1997, quantum computing began to attract industry investments for the development of a quantum computer and the design of novel quantum algorithms. For instance, the development of learning algorithms for neural networks. Some artificial neural networks models can simulate an universal Turing machine, and together with learning capabilities have numerous applications in real life problems. One limitation of artificial neural networks is the lack of an efficient algorithm to determine its optimal architecture. The main objective of this work is to verify whether we can obtain some advantage with the use of quantum computation techniques in a neural network learning and architecture selection procedure. We propose a quantum neural network, named quantum perceptron over a field (QPF). QPF is a direct generalisation of a classical perceptron which addresses some drawbacks found in previous models for quantum perceptrons. We also present a learning algorithm named Superposition based Architecture Learning algorithm (SAL) that optimises the neural network weights and architectures. SAL searches for the best architecture in a finite set of neural network architectures and neural networks parameters in linear time over the number of examples in the training set. SAL is the first quantum learning algorithm to determine neural network architectures in linear time. This speedup is obtained by the use of quantum parallelism and a non linear quantum operator. Key-words: Quantum neural networks. Artificial neural networks. Quantum computation. Architecture selection.