Recently, there has been a growing interest (both in academia and in the industry) in establishing connections between artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information (QI), which opens up new and exciting interdisciplinary research directions. In this talk I will present a novel AI model, entitled Projective simulation (PS), whose information-processing scheme, which is based on random walks on a directed graph, provides a natural route for quantum extension.
The PS model is particularly suited for tackling reinforcement learning problem, where agents learn via interaction with a rewarding environment. Though rather simple and intuitive, the model performs very well on a variety of problems, including real-world ones. I will devote the first part of my talk to the classical aspects of the model. In particular, following a short introduction of the basic PS model, I will survey its advanced capabilities, including delayed rewards scenarios (e.g. a maze), generalization, and autonomousness.
Then, in the second part of the talk, I will focus on quantum walks, particularly on discrete quantum walks, and show how such a process may give rise to a quantum PS model with a potential speedup in its ``thinking time”.
Finally, I will touch upon a different topic and show that the ability to decide if a quantum state is entangled allows an efficient solution to the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem.
Adi Makmal received her B.Sc. degree in computer science and philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She next pursued her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, where she was involved in problems in computational quantum chemistry. Afterwards she joined as a post-doctoral researcher to the Group of Quantum Information and Quantum Computation, University of Innsbruck, Austria, where she focused on problems in artificial intelligence, primarily in reinforcement learning, and studied quantum walks in the context of quantum machine learning. Recently she came back to Israel and is now living in Tel-Aviv.