Taming a non-convex landscape with dynamical long-range order: memcomputing Ising benchmarks

It is well known that physical phenomena may be of great help in computing some difficult problems efficiently. A typical example is prime factorization that may be solved in polynomial time by exploiting quantum entanglement on a quantum computer. There are, however, other types of (non-quantum) physical properties that one may leverage to compute efficiently a wide range of hard problems. In this perspective we discuss how to employ one such property, memory (time non-local...

Ising machines are hardware solvers which aim to find the absolute or approximate ground states of the Ising model. The Ising model is of fundamental computational interest because it is possible to formulate any problem in the complexity class NP as an Ising problem with only polynomial overhead. A scalable Ising machine that outperforms existing standard digital computers could have a huge impact for practical applications for a wide variety of optimization problems. In thi...

Quantum annealers, coherent Ising machines and digital Ising machines for solving quantum-inspired optimization problems have been developing rapidly due to their near-term applications. The numerical solvers of the digital Ising machines are based on traditional computing devices. In this work, we propose a fast and efficient solver for the Ising optimization problems. The algorithm consists of a pruning method that exploits the graph information of the Ising model to reduce...

Dynamical Ising machines are actively investigated from the perspective of finding efficient heuristics for NP-hard optimization problems. However, the existing data demonstrate super-polynomial scaling of the running time with the system size, which is incompatible with large NP-hard problems. We show that oscillator networks implementing the Kuramoto model of synchronization are capable of demonstrating polynomial scaling. The dynamics of these networks is related to the se...

We study large networks of parametric oscillators as heuristic solvers of random Ising models. In these networks, known as coherent Ising machines, the model to be solved is encoded in the coupling between the oscillators, and a solution is offered by the steady state of the network. This approach relies on the assumption that mode competition steers the network to the ground-state solution of the Ising model. By considering a broad family of frustrated Ising models, we show ...

Many combinatorial optimization problems can be mapped to finding the ground states of the corresponding Ising Hamiltonians. The physical systems that can solve optimization problems in this way, namely Ising machines, have been attracting more and more attention recently. Our work shows that Ising machines can be realized using almost any nonlinear self-sustaining oscillators with logic values encoded in their phases. Many types of such oscillators are readily available for ...

This paper draws attention to a hardware system which can be engineered so that its intrinsic physics is described by the generalized Ising model and can encode the solution to many important NP-hard problems as its ground state. The basic constituents are stochastic nanomagnets which switch randomly between the $\pm 1$ Ising states and can be monitored continuously with standard electronics. Their mutual interactions can be short or long range, and their strengths can be rec...

In this work, we introduce the concept of an entirely new circuit architecture based on the novel, physics-inspired computing paradigm: Memcomputing. In particular, we focus on digital memcomputing machines (DMMs) that can be designed leveraging properties of non-linear dynamical systems; ultimate descriptors of electronic circuits. The working principle of these systems relies on the ability of currents and voltages of the circuit to self-organize in order to satisfy mathema...

Memcomputing is a novel paradigm of computation that utilizes dynamical elements with memory to both store and process information on the same physical location. Its building blocks can be fabricated in hardware with standard electronic circuits, thus offering a path to its practical realization. In addition, since memcomputing is based on non-quantum elements, the equations of motion describing these machines can be simulated efficiently on standard computers. In fact, it wa...

The recent emergence of novel computational devices, such as quantum computers, coherent Ising machines, and digital annealers presents new opportunities for hardware-accelerated hybrid optimization algorithms. Unfortunately, demonstrations of unquestionable performance gains leveraging novel hardware platforms have faced significant obstacles. One key challenge is understanding the algorithmic properties that distinguish such devices from established optimization approaches....