Future Technologies Colloquium Series

ABSTRACT:

D-Wave processors are designed to harness a fundamental principle of nature that operates in both quantum and classical regimes—the propensity for all physical systems to minimize their free energy. The computational model underlying this design is referred to as quantum annealing, which is a novel heuristic approach to solving optimization problems. The long-time limit of quantum annealing is known as adiabatic quantum computation, which is a universal model for quantum computation. In this seminar I will introduce this computational model and provide some context for why we are focusing on it. I will then introduce our hardware, which is based on lithographically defined niobium circuits, and present results of some device- and processor-level testing. Finally I’ll describe how such hardware can be used in a hybrid quantum/classical heuristic algorithm for Maximum Common Subgraph, a problem that arises in several artificial intelligence problems.