Solving the Minimum Spanning Tree Problem with a Quantum Annealer

Quantum annealing (QA) is a different technology from gate-model quantum computing. This research proposes a novel technique for solving the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) (or, the minimum weight spanning tree) problem on a quantum annealer. The problem is of interest due to its applications in clustering, unsupervised learning, network design, and image processing to name a few. The advent of quantum cloud computing has provided access to quantum computing tools, previously unavailable to the general community. D-Wave systems recently released cloud access to their quantum annealer type hardware, which this project leverages to provide a novel solution method to the MST problem.