Reaching Quantum Advantage on Super Sudokus with D-Wave

The D-Wave Quantum Annealing machine, not cooled down to 15 mK in this picture. Courtesy of D-Wave Media.

This article on the Medium publication “TowardsDataScience” discusses our Python experiments and results with the D-Wave Quantum Annealing Machine when we programmed and unleashed them on Super Sudokus up to size 49 * 49, so not just your regular 9 * 9 ones.

To the best of our knowledge, this has never been done successfully before. Code online never goes beyond 2x2 for the gate model quantum computers and D-waves own sudoku code online only goes up to 3x3 for their quantum annealing machines, meaning quantum advantage on Sudokus is nowhere to be found online.

With our code, we almost always get valid solutions and show quantum advantage (time to solution savings) of 31% and 82% compared to the latest and fastest MIP solver Gurobi v9.1.0 on super sudokus on classical computers.

Read here on Medium’s “Towards Data Science” publication how we did it, and how you can too, for free, with our open sourced Python QuantumSudoku code and via a developer scheme of 1 free quantum computer minute renewed every month with D-Wave.

A solved Sudoku of size 49 * 49, which we call size 7 * 7 * 7 * 7.
We solved it both classically and quantumly… and quantumly is faster, by 82%!