  Hamiltonian oracles are the continuum limit of the standard unitary quantum
oracles. In this limit, the problem of finding the optimal query algorithm can
be mapped into the problem of finding shortest paths on a manifold. The study
of these shortest paths leads to lower bounds of the original unitary oracle
problem. A number of example Hamiltonian oracles are studied in this paper,
including oracle interrogation and the problem of computing the XOR of the
hidden bits. Both of these problems are related to the study of geodesics on
spheres with non-round metrics. For the case of two hidden bits a complete
description of the geodesics is given. For n hidden bits a simple lower bound
is proven that shows the problems require a query time proportional to n, even
in the continuum limit. Finally, the problem of continuous Grover search is
reexamined leading to a modest improvement to the protocol of Farhi and
Gutmann.
