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Talk about scientific illiteracy in science media. > “traveling salesman problem” They quoted it - which means they obviously don't know what they are talking
by SolarNet 10y ago
Talk about scientific illiteracy in science media.
> “traveling salesman problem”
They quoted it - which means they obviously don't know what they are talking about - and then go on to talk about esoteric things (Ising machine) as if that's some sort of justification.
An Ising machine is also a Turing machine and the traveling salesman problem is NP complete. Which means no breakthroughs. It can however, maybe, be more performant at certain kind of problems (like statistical solutions to optimization problems... like the traveling salesman problem). Like a GPU is more performant at doing lots of floating point operations at once; but not that it will be any faster, in the large scale, at solving hard problems like the traveling salesman problem.
And they present it with a vague description which makes it sound like it might just be some sort of quantum system. It isn't. The failure to provide facts, to challenge assertions and claims, to actually know, in our news media is super annoying.
And the clickbait, uggh.
- deepnotderp 10y agoYeah, agreed. Optic-based systems could theoretically be very fast at combinatoric and even FLOP heavy problems.
- Roritharr 10y ago>The failure to provide facts, to challenge assertions and claims, to actually know, in our news media is super annoying. This is still a result of the fact that technical journalists get paid a fraction of what an engineer gets paid. So if you have the knowledge to write good articles, you're rather going to work in the field than report on it.
- _yosefk 10y agoWhich itself is a result of the fact that people will not buy a product designed by people not competent enough to make it work, but they will happily read complete nonsense, and thus there's no incentive to pay what it takes to hire competent tech journalists.
- agumonkey 10y agoThat's an acute definition of fiction vs reality.
- coldtea 10y ago>They quoted it - which means they obviously don't know what they are talking about They might know or not know what they are talking about -- an they probably not. But that has nothing to do with whether they quoted the "traveling salesman problem".
- dvdkhlng 10y agoSorry to be nit-picking, but: * the travelling salesman problem is NP hard, not NP complete (i.e. verification of the optimal solution is not in P). * An Ising machine is not a turing machine, AFAIU, and it may not be turing complete (but not sure about that). AFAICS that machine merely implements search for an approximate optimum on some quadratic function of discretely valued variables. Maybe similar or even equivalent to the closest lattice point problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_problem#Closest_vector_problem_.28CVP.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_problem#Closest_vector...). One could optimistically say, that this is a very special purpose machine. Pessimistically I would say this is the only remotely usable "computation" that can be implemented when you only have unreliable (non-deterministic) components. So the fact that they did not implement a proper turing-complete circuit may be more a bug than a feauture. [edit] one may view their chip as a very fast hardware-accelerated implementation of a very simple (i.e. slow) algorithm. [edit2] Obviously, if the Ising machine is capable to find an exact solution to an arbitrary NP-hard optimization problem, then that machine must be turing complete (but still may take exponential time even for problems in P). However, with an imperfect Ising machine (that does not implement perfect annealing or retains an error rate even at lowest temperature) it is pretty difficult to assess turing completeness.
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