Comparing Quantum Annealing and Simulated Annealing when Solving the Graph Coloring Problem

Sammanfattning

Quantum annealing (QA) is an optimization process in quantum computing similar to the probabilistic metaheuristic simulated annealing (SA). The QA process involves encoding an optimization problem into an energy landscape, which it then traverses in search for the point of minimal energy representing the global optimal state. In this thesis two different implementations of QA are examined, one run on a binary quadratic model (BQM) and one on a discrete quadratic model (DQM). These are then compared to their traditional counterpart: SA, in terms of performance and accuracy when solving the graph coloring problem (GCP). Regarding performance, the results illustrate how SA outperforms both QA implementations. However, it is apparent that these slower execution times are mostly due to various overhead costs that appear because of limited hardware. When only looking at the quantum annealing part of the process, it is about a hundred times faster than the SA process. When it comes to accuracy, both the DQM-implementation of QA and SA provided results of high quality, whereas the BQM-implementation performed notably worse, both by often not finding the optimal values and by sometimes returning invalid results.