A framework is presented for the design and analysis of quantum mechanical algorithms, the sqrt(N) step quantum search algorithm is an immediate consequence of this framework. It leads to several other search-type applications - several examples are presented. Also, it leads to quantum mechanical algorithms for problems not immediately connected with search - two such algorithms are presented for estimating the mean and median of statistical distributions. Both algorithms require fewer steps than the fastest possible classical algorithms; also both are considerably simpler and faster than existing quantum mechanical algorithms for the respective problems.
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