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Experimental investigation of performance differences between Coherent Ising Machines and a quantum annealer has been published in Science Advances

  • Combinatorial Optimization

Title: Experimental investigation of performance differences between Coherent Ising Machines and a quantum annealer

(Science Advances 5(5), eaau0823)

Authors: Ryan Hamerly, Takahiro Inagaki, Peter L. McMahon, Davide Venturelli, Alireza Marandi, Tatsuhiro Onodera, Edwin Ng, Carsten Langrock, Kensuke Inaba, Toshimori Honjo, Koji Enbutsu, Takeshi Umeki, Ryoichi Kasahara, Shoko Utsunomiya, Satoshi Kako, Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi, Robert L. Byer, Martin M. Fejer, Hideo Mabuchi, Dirk Englund, Eleanor Rieffel, Hiroki Takesue and Yoshihisa Yamamoto

Published on 24 May 2019

Abstract: Physical annealing systems provide heuristic approaches to solving combinatorial optimization problems. Here, we benchmark two types of annealing machines—a quantum annealer built by D-Wave Systems and measurement-feedback coherent Ising machines (CIMs) based on optical parametric oscillators—on two problem classes, the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model and MAX-CUT. The D-Wave quantum annealer outperforms the CIMs on MAX-CUT on cubic graphs. On denser problems, however, we observe an exponential penalty for the quantum annealer [exp(–αDWN2)] relative to CIMs [exp(–αCIMN)] for fixed anneal times, both on the SK model and on 50% edge density MAX-CUT. This leads to a several orders of magnitude time-to-solution difference for instances with over 50 vertices. An optimal–annealing time analysis is also consistent with a substantial projected performance difference. The difference in performance between the sparsely connected D-Wave machine and the fully-connected CIMs provides strong experimental support for efforts to increase the connectivity of quantum annealers.

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