  Although measurement and unitary processes can accomplish any quantum
evolution in principle, thinking in terms of dissipation and damping can be
powerful. We propose a modification of Grover's algorithm in which the idea of
damping plays a natural role. Remarkably, we have found that there is a
critical damping value that divides between the quantum $O(\sqrt{N})$ and
classical O(N) search regimes. In addition, by allowing the damping to vary in
a fashion we describe, one obtains a fixed-point quantum search algorithm in
which ignorance of the number of targets increases the number of oracle queries
only by a factor of 1.5.
