Self-contained relaxation-based dynamical Ising machines

Abstract Dynamical Ising machines are based on continuous dynamical systems evolving from a generic initial state to a state strongly related to the ground state of the classical Ising model on a graph. Reaching the ground state is equivalent to finding the maximum (weighted) cut of the graph, which presents the Ising machines as an alternative way to solving and investigating NP-complete problems. Among the dynamical models, relaxation-based models are distinguished by their relations with guarantees of performance achieved in time scaling polynomially with the problem size. However, the terminal states of such machines are essentially non-binary, necessitating special post-processing relying on disparate computing. We show that an Ising machine implementing a special continuous dynamical system (called the $$V_2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>V</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:math> model) solves the rounding problem dynamically. We prove that the $$V_2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>V</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:math> model, starting from an arbitrary non-binary state, terminates in a state that trivially rounds to a binary state with the cut at least as big as obtained by optimal rounding of the initial state. Besides showing that relaxation-based dynamical Ising machines can be made self-contained, this result presents a non-Boolean realization of solving a non-trivial information processing task on Ising machines. Moreover, we prove that if the initial state of the $$V_2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>V</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:math> -machine is a random limited amplitude perturbation of a binary state, the machine progresses to a state with at least as high cut as that of the initial binary state. Since the probability of improving the cut is finite, this shows that the $$V_2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>V</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:math> -machine with random agitations converges to a maximum cut state almost surely.