A comparison of Oscillatory Ising Machines and Simulated Bifurcation Machines for Solving Maximum Cut Problems
Md Shabaz Ansari, Hemkant Nehete, Andrea Grimaldi, Luciano Mazza, Eleonora Raimondo, Vito Puliafito, Giovanni Finocchio, Brajesh Kumar Kaushik · 2024
Unconventional computing approaches have gained significant attention in the search for hardware-friendly solvers capable of finding the solution of combinatorial optimization problems COPs. Among others, oscillator-based, or oscillatory, Ising machines (OIMs), and simulated bifurcation-based Ising machines (SBMs) are two promising paradigms that are based on dynamical equations. This work presents a preliminary direct software comparison between an OIM and an SBM on instances from the G-set, a well-known benchmark library of maximum cut problems. The performance of the two paradigms is compared in terms of their average optimal approximation within a given number of timesteps using the same integration scheme. Our findings show that OIM performs better when optimizing its parameter for a specific problem or topology, while SBM has better performance in scenarios in which preprocessing is not possible, i.e., when considering large batches of instances with varied topologies and scales.