Experimental investigation of performance differences between Coherent Ising Machines and a quantum annealer

Physical annealing systems provide heuristic approaches to solving NP-hard Ising optimization problems. Here, we study the performance of two types of annealing machines--a commercially available quantum annealer built by D-Wave Systems, and measurement-feedback coherent Ising machines (CIMs) based on optical parametric oscillator networks--on two classes of problems, the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model and MAX-CUT. The D-Wave quantum annealer outperforms the CIMs on MAX-CUT on regular graphs of degree 3. On denser problems, however, we observe an exponential penalty for the quantum annealer (\(\exp(-\alpha_\textrm{DW} N^2)\)) relative to CIMs (\(\exp(-\alpha_\textrm{CIM} N)\)) for fixed anneal times, on both the SK model and on 50%-edge-density MAX-CUT, where the coefficients \(\alpha_\textrm{CIM}\) and \(\alpha_\textrm{DW}\) are problem-class-dependent. On instances with over \(50\) vertices, a several-orders-of-magnitude time-to-solution difference exists between CIMs and the D-Wave annealer. An optimal-annealing-time analysis is also consistent with a significant projected performance difference. The difference in performance between the sparsely connected D-Wave machine and the measurement-feedback facilitated all-to-all connectivity of the CIMs provides strong experimental support for efforts to increase the connectivity of quantum annealers.