Conference PaperQuantum algorithm for estimating volumes of convex bodiesChakrabarti, Shouvanik; Childs, Andrew; Hung, Shih-Han; Li, Tongyang; Wang, Chunhao; Wu, XiaodiEstimating the volume of a convex body is a central problem in convex geometry and can be viewed as a continuous version of counting. We present a quantum algorithm that estimates the volume of an n-dimensional convex body within multiplicative error ϵ using Õ (n3+n2.5/ϵ) queries to a membership oracle and Õ (n5+n4.5/ϵ) additional arithmetic operations. For comparison, the best known classical algorithm uses Õ (n4+n3/ϵ2) queries and Õ (n6+n5/ϵ2) additional arithmetic operations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantum speedup for volume estimation. Our algorithm is based on a refined framework for speeding up simulated annealing algorithms that might be of independent interest. This framework applies in the setting of "Chebyshev cooling", where the solution is expressed as a telescoping product of ratios, each having bounded variance. We develop several novel techniques when implementing our framework, including a theory of continuous-space quantum walks with rigorous bounds on discretization error.2020-01-0110172835Annual Conference on Quantum Information Processinghttps://doi.org/1816695National Science Foundation