Experiments with an oscillator based Ising machine

TL;DR

This paper presents an experimental oscillator-based Ising machine capable of solving NP-hard problems, demonstrating its potential as an unconventional computing approach that leverages coupled oscillators to encode and solve complex optimization problems.

Contribution

It introduces an experimental implementation of an oscillator-based Ising machine and provides empirical results showcasing its problem-solving capabilities.

Findings

Successfully solved NP-hard problems like max-cut

Demonstrated phase-based encoding of problem solutions

Validated the feasibility of oscillator networks for unconventional computing

Abstract

Interest in non-algorithmic, unconventional computing is rising in recent years due to more and more apparent short comings of classic stored-program digital computers, such as energy efficiency, degree of parallelism in computations, clock frequency limitations, integration density, silicon utilization, etc. One notable such unconventional approach are oscillator based Ising machines, i.e., systems consisting of a number of oscillators which can be coupled in order to create an analogue for some problem to be solved, while the actual information is encoded in the phase relationships of these oscillators with respect to some reference (typically one of these oscillators). It has been shown that machines of this type are capable of solving NP-hard problems such as max-cut, etc. In the following an experimental Ising machine is presented together with experimental results obtained from this machine.