Figure 2
From: Cyclic quantum annealing: searching for deep low-energy states in 5000-qubit spin glass
Performance of cyclic annealing. (a) Decreasing energy curve. The orange dots represent the progressively lower energy state found by cyclic annealing for a selected problem from our comparison set. Green stars and blue dashed lines mark the answers from cyclic annealing and forward annealing respectively. Notably, by the third cycle, cyclic annealing outperforms forward annealing. (b) Position in the Gaussian distribution. The histogram depicts the distribution of states obtained through forward annealing, fitting a Gaussian distribution with \(\mu =-15{,}685.47, \sigma =19.30\); see the orange line. The relative positions of cyclic (green dashed line) and forward (blue dashed line) annealing solutions in the distribution highlight the deeper reach of the former; see inset. (c) Results of comparison experiment. In an equal-time comparison of cyclic and forward annealing across 50 problems, the energy differences \(\Delta E\) (normalized to the forward annealing’s standard deviation \(\sigma\)) are marked by crosses. Cyclic annealing’s superiority is evident, with lower-energy solutions in \(86\%\) of cases (green crosses).
