Scientists Compare Quantum Annealer with the Coherent Ising Machine

(Advances-Science) A team of Scientists from around the globe have performed the first direct comparison between the D-Wave 2000Q (DW2Q) quantum annealer and the coherent Ising machine (CIM) (24, 25). The DW2Q quantum annealer used in this work is installed at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.
A crucial distinction between these systems is their intrinsic connectivity, which has a profound influence on their performance. Both systems are designed to solve the classical Ising problem.
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.
The findings suggest 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.