Quantum annealing
양자 어닐링
A quantum computing approach aimed at problems of picking the best one out of a huge number of combinations.
Overview
Problems where there are too many possibilities to check one by one, like the fastest order for a delivery truck to visit many houses, are called optimization problems. Quantum annealing rewrites such a problem as "finding the lowest-energy state," and lets the qubits settle into that state on their own to get the answer.
A company called D-Wave has made equipment for this approach for a long time. Unlike the approach that chains gates to do any kind of calculation, the kinds of problems it can solve are fixed. Whether it is really faster than an ordinary computer depends on the problem, and people are still checking.
An everyday example
Put a marble on a bumpy board of hills and valleys and shake it gently, and the marble rolls into the deepest valley. That deepest spot is the answer to the problem.
Why it matters
Delivery routes, work schedules and factory timetables are the optimization problems companies solve every day. When "annealing" shows up in quantum news, it helps to know it is a different kind from the quantum computer people usually talk about.
Also calledquantum annealer