Quantum search with prior knowledge

The combination of contextual side information and search is a powerful paradigm in the scope of artificial intelligence. The prior knowledge enables the identification of possible solutions but may be imperfect. Contextual information can arise naturally, for example in game AI where prior knowledge is used to bias move decisions. In this work we investigate the problem of taking quantum advantage of contextual information, especially searching with prior knowledge. We propose a new generalization of Grover’s search algorithm that achieves the optimal expected success probability of finding the solution if the number of queries is fixed. Experiments on small-scale quantum circuits verify the advantage of our algorithm. Since contextual information exists widely, our method has wide applications. We take game tree search as an example.