How to Boost Ising Machines' Ability to Find Optimum Solutions: a Bifurcation Analysis
Jacob Lamers, Guy Verschaffelt, Guy Van der Sande · 2023
Photonic Ising machines are a recent and promising non-von Neuman architecture to efficiently solve large NP-hard optimization problems. This is done by letting spins evolve to the ground state of the Ising system. However, the Ising machine does not always relax to this ground state and can get trapped in local minima, resulting in suboptimal solutions. Here, we show that Ising-encoded optimization problems implemented on analog Ising machines can be divided in three difficulty classes and we propose an annealing scheme to efficiently solve two of them. Furthermore, we show that changing the physical implementation of the Ising machine can cause a problem to change difficulty class, rendering it potentially a lot more easy to solve.