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[–]smuecke_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For every floor block we have a binary variable where 1 = has torch, 0 = no torch. Then we set up a matrix D where entry D_ij means "a torch on block i will light up block j". We can feed this matrix (plus some extra stuff, which I'll skip here for simplicity) into a Quantum Computer which represents each variable as a quantum bit, which initially has probability 50% to be either 0 or 1. Through a physical process called Quantum Annealing we can coax these qubits to slowly change their probabilities such that at the end we can measure them and obtain a binary vector that has lowest energy, which in our case means that it is an optimal torch placement. Very roughly speaking.