Software Engineering Institute

A major milestone in quantum computing research is to demonstrate quantum supremacy, which refers to a quantum computer performing a calculation that is unfeasible for a classical computer. While quantum supremacy may be demonstrable in the near-term noisy intermediate scale quantum computing (NISQ) era, such a demonstration of supremacy does not afford an advantage for practical applications. A common practical problem used in benchmarking high performance classical and quantum computing is Maxcut, with applications in domains such as machine scheduling, image recognition, electronic circuit layout, and software verification and validation.