Quantum computers have already managed to surpass ordinary computers in solving certain tasks - unfortunately, totally useless ones. The next milestone is to get them to do useful things. Researchers ...

An optimization problem is one where you have to make the best decision (choose the best investments, minimize your company’s costs, find the class schedule with the fewest morning classes, or so on).

Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research shows how to implement simulated annealing for the Traveling Salesman Problem (find the best ordering of a set of discrete items). The goal of a combinatorial ...

We walk through an optimization problem step by step, clearly explaining how to identify variables, set up the correct ...