In this paper we propose a special computational device which uses light rays for solving the Hamiltonian path problem on a directed graph. The device has a graph-like representation and the light is traversing it by following the routes given by the connections between nodes. In each node the rays are uniquely marked so that they can be easily identified. At the destination node we will search only for particular rays that have passed only once through each node. We show that the proposed device can solve small and medium instances of the problem in reasonable time.
In this paper we discuss physical aspects of intractable (NP-complete) computing problems. We show, using a specibc model, that a quantum-mechanical computer can in principle solve an NP-complete problem in polynomial time; however, it would use an exponentially large energy for that computation. We conjecture that our model reflects a complementarity principle concerning the time and the energy needed to perform an NP-complete computation This paper uses instances of SAT, 3SAT and TSP to describe how evolutionary search (running on a classical computer) differs from quantum search (running on a quantum computer) for solving NP problems.