Complexity of multivariate Feynman-Kac path integration in randomized and quantum settings

Abstract

The Feynman-Kac path integration problem was studied in the worst case setting by Plaskota et al. (J. Comp. Phys. 164 (2000) 335) for the univariate case and by Kwas and Li (J. Comp. 19 (2003) 730) for the multivariate case with d space variables. In this paper we consider the multivariate Feynman-Kac path integration problem in the randomized and quantum settings. For smooth multivariate functions, it was proven in Kwas and Li (2003) that the classical worst case complexity suffers from the curse of dimensionality in d. We show that in both the randomized and quantum settings the curse of dimensionality is vanquished, i.e., the number of function evaluations and/or quantum queries required to compute an e-approximation has a bound independent of d and depending polynomially on 1/e. The exponents of these polynomials are at most 2 in the randomized setting and at most 1 in the quantum setting. Hence we have exponential speedup over the classical worst case setting and quadratic speedup of the quantum setting over the randomized setting. However, both the randomized and quantum algorithms presented here still require extensive precomputing, similar to the algorithms of Plaskota et al. (2000) and Kwas and Li(2003).