■Title : Quantum Optimization Benchmarking Library: The Intractable Decathlon
■Venue : IMI Conference Room (W1-D-414)/Live streaming with Zoom
■Speaker : THORSTEN, Koch (Zuse Institute Berlin/Technische Universität Berlin)
■Attendance: 12(Students:3; Staff:8; Others:1)

Prof. Koch introduced the importance of verification benchmarking to evaluate new hardware technologies and computational methods—such as quantum computers—that claim to “solve” problems (like NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems) more efficiently than conventional approaches. While many of these new hardware technologies and computational methods can derive “good” solutions, they are not guaranteed optimality in general. It is also crucial to distinguish between the inherent NP-hardness of a problem and the difficulty of proving the optimality of a solution.
Prof. Koch has established the “Intractable Decathlon” — a collection of problems that are challenging even for classical methods — and advocated for fair comparisons between “classical” hardware and “quantum/specialized” hardware using common problem instances. Prof. Koch also emphasized the need for a cautious assessment of quantum computing’s advantages and pointed out that, in the future, it will be necessary to consider again formulations and mathematical models themselves to better suit these new computational principles.