First Results Solving Arbitrarily Structured Maximum Independent Set Problems Using Quantum Annealing

Commercial quantum processing units (QPUs) such as those made by D-Wave Systems are being increasingly used for solving complex combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we review a canonical NP-hard problem, the Maximum Independent Set (MIS) problem. We show how to map MIS problems to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems, and use a D-Wave 2000Q QPU to solve them. We compare the results from the D-Wave system to classical algorithms such as simulated thermal annealing and the graphical networks package NetworkX. To our knowledge, these are the first results of experiments involving arbitrarily-structured MIS inputs using a D-Wave QPU. We find that the QPU can be used as a heuristic optimizer for randomly generated inputs, but due to physical control errors, can be outperformed by simulated thermal annealing.