Abstract
Building a network that is resilient to a component failure is vital. Our access to electricity and telecommunications or the internet of things all hinge on an uninterrupted service provided by a robust network. Calculating the network reliability R is P-complete and intractable to calculate exactly for medium and large networks. Here, we present an explicit, circuit-level implementation of a quantum algorithm that computes R. Our algorithm requires O(EV/ε) gate operations and O(E) qubits, where V and E are the number of nodes and edges in the graph and ε is the uncertainty in the reliability estimation. This constitutes a significant polynomial speedup over the best classical approaches currently known. We further provide quantum gate counts, relevant for both pre-fault-tolerant and fault-tolerant regimes, sufficient to compute R.