This. Essentially, all the quantum annealing stuff that D-Wave does follows the patter of mapping a problem onto a spin glass and then finding the ground state

This. Essentially, all the quantum annealing stuff that D-Wave does follows the patter of mapping a problem onto a spin glass and then finding the ground state with annealing. The only really interesting theoretical aspect is finding good maps form hard problems to spin glasses. This is a nice reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.5843 https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.5843