A Measurement-based Algorithm for Graph Colouring.

We present a novel algorithmic approach to find a proper vertex colouring of a graph with d colours, if it exists. We associate a d-dimensional quantum system with each vertex and the initial state is a mixture of all possible colourings, from which we obtain a random proper colouring of the graph by measurements. The non-deterministic nature of the quantum measurement is tackled by a reset operation, which can revert the effect of unwanted projections. As in the classical case, we find that the runtime scales exponentially with the number of vertices. However, we provide numerical evidence that the average runtime for random graphs scales polynomially in the number of edges.