arXiv (Cornell University)
Inference of maximum parsimony phylogenetic trees with model-based classical and quantum methods
August 2025 • Jiawei Zhang, Yibo Chen, Jun-Han Huang
The maximum parsimony phylogenetic tree reconstruction problem is NP-hard, presenting a computational bottleneck for classical computing and motivating the exploration of emerging paradigms like quantum computing. To this end, we design three optimization models compatible with both classical and quantum solvers. Our method directly searches the complete solution space of all possible tree topologies and ancestral states, thereby avoiding the potential biases associated with pre-constructing candidate internal nod…