  Preparing the ground state of a system of interacting classical particles is
an NP-hard problem. Thus, there is in general no better algorithm to solve this
problem than exhaustively going through all N configurations of the system to
determine the one with lowest energy, requiring a running time proportional to
N. A quantum computer, if it could be built, could solve this problem in time
sqrt(N). Here, we present a powerful extension of this result to the case of
interacting quantum particles, demonstrating that a quantum computer can
prepare the ground state of a quantum system as efficiently as it does for
classical systems.
