Concept record · edition 0.1.0

Penalty term

A term added to an objective so that violating a hard constraint costs more than any feasible improvement, converting a constrained problem into an unconstrained one.

Why it matters

It is how real constraints — budgets, capacities, exclusivity — enter a QUBO at all.

What this does not establish

Penalty multipliers widen the energy scale and worsen conditioning; a formally correct encoding can be numerically much harder to solve than the problem it encodes.

Claims using this concept

Sources

primary paper · identifier verified

Ising formulations of many NP problems

Andrew Lucas · 2013

arXiv:1302.5843

Catalogues explicit Ising encodings for NP-hard problems — the step that turns a combinatorial problem into a spin model a tensor network can act on.

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