Comparison of D-Wave Quantum Annealing and Classical Simulated Annealing for Local Minima Determination
Restricted Boltzmann Machines trained with different numbers of iterations were used to provide a large diverse set of energy functions each containing many local valleys (LVs). They were used to confirm the property of the D-Wave quantum annealer (QA) to find potentially important LVs in the energy functions of Markov Random Fields that may be missed by classical searches. Even after a prohibitively long classical search by simulated annealing (SA), as many as 30-50% of the QA-found LVs remained not found by the SA.