Red State, Blue State… Colored by a quantum computer. I […]

Red State, Blue State… Colored by a quantum computer.

I saw this four-colored map of U.S. counties in the D-Wave board pack. The “four-color theorem” states that no more than four colors are needed to color a map such that no adjacent regions have the came color. This proved remarkably difficult to prove and was the first major theorem to be proved using a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem

D-Wave embedded the map-coloring problem for the U.S. counties into a prototype quantum computer with iterative partitioning.