{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/quantum-annealing-vs-qaoa-127-qubit-higher","title":"Quantum Annealing vs. QAOA: 127 Qubit Higher-Order Ising Problems on NISQ Computers","arxiv_id":"2301.00520","date":"2023-01-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Elijah Pelofske","Andreas Bärtschi","Stephan Eidenbenz"],"abstract":"Quantum annealing (QA) and Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (QAOA) are both heuristic quantum algorithms intended for sampling optimal solutions of combinatorial optimization problems. In this article we implement a rigorous direct comparison between QA on D-Wave hardware and QAOA on IBMQ hardware. These two quantum algorithms are also compared against classical simulated annealing. The studied problems are instances of a class of Ising models, with variable assignments of $+1$ or $-1$, that contain cubic $ZZZ$ interactions (higher order terms) and match both the native connectivity of the Pegasus topology D-Wave chips and the heavy hexagonal lattice of the IBMQ chips. The novel QAOA implementation on the heavy hexagonal lattice has a CNOT depth of $6$ per round and allows for usage of an entire heavy hexagonal lattice. Experimentally, QAOA is executed on an ensemble of randomly generated Ising instances with a grid search over $1$ and $2$ round angles using all 127 programmable superconducting transmon qubits of ibm_washington. The error suppression technique digital dynamical decoupling is also tested on all QAOA circuits. QA is executed on the same Ising instances with the programmable superconducting flux qubit devices D-Wave Advantage_system4.1 and Advantage_system6.1 using modified annealing schedules with pauses. We find that QA outperforms QAOA on all problem instances. We also find that dynamical decoupling enables 2-round QAOA to marginally outperform 1-round QAOA, which is not the case without dynamical decoupling.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00520v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00520v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"quantum-annealing-vs-qaoa-127-qubit-higher","repo_url":"https://github.com/lanl/qaoa_vs_qa","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}