2020 Tayur Prize

A year ago (in What would Steve Jobs do?) I challenged IIT-Madras undergraduates to compete for:

The 2020 Tayur Prize for prototyping and optimizing on a Coherent Ising Machine.

Anil Prabhakar, Prabha Mandayam and Nitin Chandrachoodan (faculty from IIT-Madras) served as mentors; Davide Venturelli (NASA), Peter McMahon (Cornell), Aaron Danner (NUS), Vikesh Siddhu (JILA) and David Bernal (CMU) assisted in the judging. Thank you all so much!

It is our immense pleasure to announce (and showcase) the winners. You can find the details of the two prize-winning prototypes (and their numerical performance) by clicking on the links. 

First: Time-Multiplexed CIM: Gautham, Parth, Gautam. They focused on Max-Cut problem.

Second: Spatial-Photonic IM: Vikram, Vignesh. They tackled the Number Partitioning problem.

Congratulations!

PS: To learn more about Unconventional Computing (such as Ising), you can view my TEDxCMU 2020 interview and/or read about it in my recent OR/MS Today article Unconventional Computing: Applications, Hardware, Algorithms. For a light hearted jab on Turing (and IBM, Google), I channeled Chuck Berry in Roll over Turing.