alt Hacker NewsA 2048-spin bulk acoustic wave Ising machine for number partitioning and Sudoku
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Kind of like the “uncooked spaghetti length” sorting algorithm: gravity. Hold them in your fist vertically, let them gently fall to a flat surface. Sorted.
Ising machines are interesting, but I don't understand the point of the BAW delay line at all. It doesn't act like an array of coupled oscillators or resonators, just an old-school circulating delay-line memory, right? The kind they used to build with mercury in the days before RoHS was a thing?
If the FPGA is doing the actual matrix math based on measurements of the pulses circulating in the delay line, with no coupling interaction between those pulses, why not just store the phases and amplitudes digitally in block RAM as well?
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tl;dr:
A new, stable computer uses sound waves to solve really hard puzzles.
Not the game 2048. But yes, the game Sodoku.
The paper could be improved by including a strong classical non-Ising-machine solution approach as one of the methods benchmarked against.
E.g. take the same 8-core Ryzen machine they use to implement their simulated Ising Machine HbSB method & use it to run a standard classical solver as would be done industrially to tackle these kinds of problems outside of academia - perhaps an industrial grade commercial MIP solver (Gurobi) for those problem classes that are known to have reasonable MIP formulations, or a good constraint solver for Sudoku, etc.
Depending on how hard the specific test problem instances are, perhaps a commercial MIP solver would be able to solve some of these problems optimally & instantly using its black box of presolve witchcraft tricks.