Thom, Lorenzo & Gago (D-Wave, InspirationQ, Moody’s): Honest TSP benchmarks against classical solvers

Key takeaways

• The Travelling Salesperson Problem is a useful stand-in for real routing and scheduling problems, but most public quantum demos oversimplify it compared to what industry actually needs solved
• Fair benchmarking means comparing against the best classical solvers tuned by experts, not against naive baselines that make quantum results look better than they are
• Moody's Analytics evaluates quantum optimization the same way it evaluates any other tool: by whether it beats the incumbent classical pipeline on cost, time, and solution quality for a specific business problem
• Hybrid workflows that combine D-Wave's annealer with classical pre and post processing currently outperform pure quantum or pure classical approaches on certain TSP instance sizes