Performance of hybrid quantum/classical variational heuristics for combinatorial optimization

Understand

The recent literature on near-term applications for quantum computers contains several examples of the applications of hybrid quantum/classical variational approaches.

• This methodology can be applied to a variety of optimization problems, but its practical performance is not well studied yet.
• This paper moves some steps in the direction of characterizing the practical performance of the methodology, in the context of finding solutions to classical combinatorial optimization problems.
• Our study is based on numerical results obtained applying several classical nonlinear optimization algorithms to Hamiltonians for six combinatorial optimization problems; the experiments are conducted via noise-free classical simulation of the quantum circuits implemented in Qiskit.