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Title: Does quantum annealing outscale classical algorithms on 3D spin glasses?
Plain: Whether quantum annealers reach good low-energy states faster, as problems grow, than the best ordinary computer methods is still argued. The answer depends on which classical methods are used for the comparison.
Precise: For 3D Edwards-Anderson instances with $N$ up to about 5000 spins, compare the scaling with $N$ and with the target residual energy per spin $\epsilon$ of the time to solution of coherent quantum annealing against named classical baselines: simulated annealing, parallel tempering, and tensor-network and variational Monte Carlo emulation of the annealing dynamics. An answer is a pair of measured scaling exponents with uncertainties for each baseline on fixed instance families with matched resources.
Settled by: A benchmark with fixed instance families, matched resources and optimized classical baselines, reporting scaling exponents over at least a decade in N.
Kind: well-posed
Answer type: yes-no
References: (empty)
Literature status: contested
Status note: The beyond-classical dynamics claim of King et al. (Science 2025) was challenged by tensor-network (Tindall et al., arXiv:2503.05693) and variational Monte Carlo (Mauron and Carleo, arXiv:2503.08247) simulations; the approximate-optimization scaling advantage of Munoz-Bauza and Lidar (PRL 2025) concerns 2D hardware-graph instances, not 3D.
Posed since: (empty)