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Quantum Annealing Learning Search Implementations

Emerging Technologies 2022-12-22 v1 Quantum Physics

Abstract

This paper presents the details and testing of two implementations (in C++ and Python) of the hybrid quantum-classical algorithm Quantum Annealing Learning Search (QALS) on a D-Wave quantum annealer. QALS was proposed in 2019 as a novel technique to solve general QUBO problems that cannot be directly represented into the hardware architecture of a D-Wave machine. Repeated calls to the quantum machine within a classical iterative structure and a related convergence proof originate a learning mechanism to find an encoding of a given problem into the quantum architecture. The present work considers the Number Partitioning Problem (NPP) and the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) for the testing of QALS. The results turn out to be quite unexpected, with QALS not being able to perform as well as the other considered methods, especially in NPP, where classical methods outperform quantum annealing in general. Nevertheless, looking at the TSP tests, QALS has fulfilled its primary goal, i.e., processing QUBO problems not directly mappable to the QPU topology.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.11132,
  title  = {Quantum Annealing Learning Search Implementations},
  author = {Andrea Bonomi and Thomas De Min and Enrico Zardini and Enrico Blanzieri and Valter Cavecchia and Davide Pastorello},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.11132},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

26 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:47:09.955Z