Advancing stable set problem solutions through quantum annealers

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of D-wave quantum annealers in solving the NP-hard stable set problem, highlighting the strengths of hybrid solvers and the limitations of pure quantum processors.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of quantum annealer performance on stable set problem instances, demonstrating the potential of hybrid approaches.

Findings

Hybrid solver yields very good solutions.

Quantum Processing Unit shows modest performance.

Performance varies with problem size and instance complexity.

Abstract

We assess the performance of D-wave quantum solvers for solving the stable set problem in a graph, one of the most studied NP-hard problems. We perform computations on some instances from the literature with up to 125 vertices and compare the quality of the obtained solutions with known optimum solutions. It turns out that the hybrid solver gives very good results, while the Quantum Processing Unit solver shows rather modest performance overall.