Benchmarking of D-Wave's and IBM's Devices on Known Quantum Solutions to NP-Complete Problems

Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize the way we solve problems that are computationally infeasible for classical computers. This paper explores the application of quantum computing to NP-complete problems, and by focusing on the Graph Coloring Problem (GCP) we benchmark the performance of two prominent quantum computing devices: D-Wave's quantum annealer and IBM's gatebased quantum processors. After mapping instances of the GCP native formulation, we evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of quantum annealing and gate-based approaches in tackling such combinatorial problems. For annealers, the problem is cast into Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) forms, while gate-based quantum devices employ variational algorithms like the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). The research includes a comparative analysis, highlighting the scalability, accuracy, and practical challenges faced by current quantum hardware.