Mathematical Aspects of the Digital Annealer’s Simulated Annealing Algorithm

The Digital Annealer is a CMOS hardware designed by Fujitsu Laboratories for high-speed solving of Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems that could be difficult to solve by means of existing general-purpose computers. In this paper, we present a mathematical description of the first-generation Digital Annealer’s Algorithm from the Markov chain theory perspective, establish a relationship between its stationary distribution with the Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution, and provide a necessary and sufficient condition on its cooling schedule that ensures asymptotic convergence to the ground states.