Graph Coloring with Quantum Annealing

Abstract: We develop a heuristic graph coloring approximation algorithm that uses the D-Wave 2X as an independent set sampler and evaluate its performance against a fully classical implementation. A randomly generated set of small but hard graph instances serves as our test set. Our performance analysis suggests limited quantum advantage in the hybrid quantum-classical algorithm. The quantum edge holds over multiple metrics and suggests that graph problem applications are a good fit for quantum annealers.