Abstracts

Role of classical hardness for quantum annealers

Itay Hen, University of Southern California

view abstract +

Recent developments in quantum technology have led to the manufacturing of experimental programmable quantum annealing optimizers containing hundreds of quantum bits. These optimizers, also known as the "D-Wave" chips, promise to solve practical optimization problems potentially faster than conventional "classical" computers. The quantum nature of these optimizers has recently become the center of a heated debate within the Quantum Computing community (and well beyond it) about the claimed superiority of these annealers over traditional devices and the degree to which they exploit their quantum capabilities. In this context, specifically of importance is the question of how well quantum annealers perform on hard problems with rugged free-energy landscapes for which classical methods are expected to fail. I will describe attempts to identify such hard D-Wave-specific problems by means of state-of-the-art methods (multi spin coding, parallel tempering simulations and stochastic time-series analysis), and present results pertaining to the performance of various classical algorithms and the D-wave Two chip on these. This is a joint work with Victor Martin-Mayor.