Performance of Domain-Wall Encoding for Quantum Annealing

In this paper we experimentally test the performance of the recently proposed domain-wall encoding of discrete variables from [Chancellor Quantum Sci. Technol. 4 045004] on Ising model flux qubit quantum annealers. We compare this encoding with the traditional one-hot methods and find that they outperform the one-hot encoding for three different problems at different sizes both of the problem and of the variables. From these results we conclude that the domain-wall encoding yields superior performance against a variety of metrics furthermore, we do not find a single metric by which one hot performs better. We even find that a 2000Q quantum annealer with a drastically less connected hardware graph but using the domain-wall encoding can outperform the next generation Advantage processor if that processor uses one-hot encoding.