  A degenerate optical parametric oscillator network is proposed to solve the
NP-hard problem of finding a ground state of the Ising model. The underlying
operating mechanism originates from the bistable output phase of each
oscillator and the inherent preference of the network in selecting oscillation
modes with the minimum photon decay rate. Computational experiments are
performed on all instances reducible to the NP-hard MAX-CUT problems on cubic
graphs of order up to 20. The numerical results reasonably suggest the
effectiveness of the proposed network.
