3 ms·
I always enjoy the Eureka moments: >“My seemingly inconsequential moment came one night while washing dishes and using a bristle brush to clean a tall glass,”
by davidkuhta 9y ago
I always enjoy the Eureka moments:
>“My seemingly inconsequential moment came one night while washing dishes and using a bristle brush to clean a tall glass,” said IBM’s Edwin Pednault. “It suddenly occurred to me that if one looks at the gates applied to a given qubit in a grid circuit, the gates form a bristle-brush pattern where the bristles are the entangling gates that are being applied to that qubit.”
He then took this idea and applied it to simulating qubits.
So let us all applaud Louis F. Kutik who after inventing the plastic bristle brush in 1964 could not have surmised it's inspiration for advancements within the quantum computing domain.
- eddanger 9y ago... and soon there will be a ban on export of plastic bristle brushes due to national security concerns.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoLet us also remember the importance of taking a break and “walking away” from hard problems. Sometimes the best thing to do is to simply stop working.
- davidkuhta 9y agoFunny, while I've found this to be true of intellectual "hard problems", I actually learned this principle from challenging video game bosses (I'm looking at you Liquid Snake!)
- jesseb 9y agoRich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Development" is a great talk regarding just this, for anybody who hasn't seen it. I personally find this is one of the most effective ways of cracking a difficult problem. It's amazing what your subconscious is capable of.