Solving SAT (and MaxSAT) with a Quantum Annealer: Foundations, Encodings, and Preliminary Results

Quantum annealers (QA) are specialized quantum computers that minimize objective functions over discrete variables by physically exploiting quantum effects. Current QA platforms allow for the optimization of quadratic objectives defined over binary variables, that is, they solve quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. In the last decade, QA systems as implemented by D-Wave have scaled with Moore-like growth. Current architectures provide 2048 sparsely-connected qubits, and continued exponential growth is anticipated.