Two Notes on Grover's Search: Programming and Discriminating

Abstract

In this work we address two questions concerning Grover's algorithm. In the first we give an answer to the question how to employ Grover's algorithm for actual search over database. We introduce a quantum model of an unordered phone book (quantum database) with programmable queries to search in the phone book either for a number, or for a name. In the second part we investigate how successful the algorithm can be if the number of elements of the database is not known precisely. This question reduces to analysis of the distinguishability of states occurring during Grover's algorithm. We found that using unambiguous discrimination scheme even a seemingly good guess, that is close to the optimal one can result in a rather small success rate.