Error correction for encoded quantum annealing

Recently, Lechner, Hauke and Zoller [Science Advances, 1(9)e1500838, (2015)] have proposed a quantum annealing architecture, in which a classical spin glass with all-to-all connectivity is simulated by a spin glass with geometrically local interactions. We interpret this architecture as a classical error-correcting code, which is highly robust against weakly correlated bit-flip noise, and we analyze the code's performance using a belief-propagation decoding algorithm. Our observations may also apply to more general encoding schemes and noise models.