Quantum Differential Evolution: An Investigation

Several research studies have been carried out on the integration of quantum operators and evolutionary algorithms. However, the performance of such integration remains questionable and needs further research for drawing a useful conclusion. Therefore, this paper takes a step forward to analyze the effect of integrating quantum entanglement and quantum NOT gate with the well-known differential evolution algorithm. The performance of different algorithm designs has been evaluated by solving a number of unconstrained real parameter single objective optimization problems. Although the integration of quantum entanglement helps to get competitive results, the overall experimental results with quantum operators are not convincing enough, especially when there are no inter-dependency among decision variables. This in turn opens up new research directions to deepen the knowledge in the design of quantum evolutionary algorithms.