Heuristic Approach Uses Photonics to Solve Complex Problems Fast

Researchers at MIT and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies have opened the path to solving NP-complete problems with integrated photonics, by developing a heuristic algorithm dedicated to solving the NP-complete Ising problem using photonics hardware. NP-complete problems — that is, nondeterministic polynomial problems — require numerous operations to solve. Optical machines that consist of a set of optical transformations conveyed to an optical signal could provide a way to solve them. Further, optical hardware integrated into silicon photonics could provide optical machines with benefits such as low-loss, parallel processing; optical passivity at low optical powers; and robust scalability. However, compact, fast,...