LLNL Team Shows Promising Results from ‘Quantum Annealer’

(LLNL.gov) An international team of researchers, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) physicist Arjun Gambhir, has developed a new algorithm for solving polynomial systems of equations using a type of quantum computer called a “quantum annealer.” The team systematically examined how this method scales when facing increasingly difficult mathematical equations, with promising results.
“We found that problems that are really hard to solve with classical computing scale differently with quantum annealing,” said LLNL physicist Gambhir. “It was really interesting. When we made problems harder, the annealer didn’t have any more trouble, and in some cases the harder problems were actually easier to solve.”