Glossary

Oracle

by Frank Zickert

An oracle is a black-box function that encodes information about a problem—typically deciding whether a given input satisfies some condition. It’s implemented as a quantum operation that can be queried in superposition, allowing a quantum algorithm to extract global properties of the function more efficiently than classical methods. Oracles are central to algorithms like Grover’s and Deutsch–Jozsa, where they guide the computation without revealing internal details.