Toward a framework for quantum evolutionary computation

Biological evolution provides an immensely powerful toolset for problem solving, while evolutionary computation attempts to harness the power of biological evolution for solving problems using classical computing paradigms. Quantum computing offers many apparent advantages over classical computing for certain types of problems, such as searching or optimizing over large solution sets. Once practical quantum computers are available, we would like to take advantage of their highly parallel computing capabilities for use in evolutionary computation. In this work we explore the nexus between quantum and evolutionary computation, and propose an approach toward a practical framework for performing evolutionary computation on quantum computers.