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Science 31 January 1997:
Vol. 275. no. 5300, pp. 627 - 628
DOI: 10.1126/science.275.5300.627
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Perspectives

Gilles Brassard

Finding a phone number in a directory when one knows the name is easy; much harder is finding the name given the number. On average, a search algorithm will have to scan half the total number of entries. If the database or directory is extremely large, the search may be impossible with classical computers. New possibilities emerge, however, with quantum computing. As Brassard discusses in his Perspective, a new algorithm developed by L. K. Grover enables much faster searching of large databases if one uses a quantum computer.

The author is at the Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7, Canada. E-mail: brassard{at}iro.umontreal.ca

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Quantum computing.
G. Brassard, I. Chuang, S. Lloyd, and C. Monroe (1998)
PNAS 95, 11032-11033
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)