Portfolios of Quantum Algorithms

Quantum computation holds promise for the solution of many intractable problems. However, since many quantum algorithms are stochastic in nature they can find the solution of hard problems only probabilistically. Thus the efficiency of the algorithms has to be characterized by both the expected time to completion and the associated variance. In order to minimize both the running time and its uncertainty, we show that portfolios of quantum algorithms analogous to those of finance can outperform single algorithms when applied to the $\mathrm{NP}$-complete problems such as 3-satisfiability.