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> “Tang is killing [Kerenidis and Prakash’s] quantum speedup, but then in another sense Tang is giving a big improvement and building on what they did. Tang nev
by vanderZwan 8y ago
> “Tang is killing [Kerenidis and Prakash’s] quantum speedup, but then in another sense Tang is giving a big improvement and building on what they did. Tang never would have come up with this classical algorithm but for their quantum algorithm,” Aaronson said.
I think this deserves more emphasis: regardless of whether or not we need a quantum computer in the end, as a model quantum computing is apparently useful to do research with and advance the status quo of our knowledge.
- fossuser 8y agoIt's worth noting that the title of the paper does emphasize this: A quantum-inspired classical algorithm for recommendation systems. The abstract does too: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04271 https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04271
- sitkack 8y agoHumble scientist right there, live long and prosper brother.
- akvadrako 8y agoThis is a bit speculative, but I suspect quantum theory is essentially god's programming language. It seems to crop up everywhere we look, like in psychology, biology, machine learning, computer science and general probability.
- jonny_eh 8y ago> essentially god's programming language That metaphor seems to confuse people more than it clarifies. Did you perhaps mean "nature's programming language"?
- pluto9 8y agoWhat's confusing about it?
- redmaple 8y agothat there is no God. Hail Satan!
- stochastic_monk 8y agoWhat is a deity from the perspective of quantum computing? It seems to be forcing one’s own opinions on essentially an imagined character.
- zaarn 8y agoA debugger. It can change state arbitrarily, introspect all the data and step forward in execution.
- squirrelicus 8y agoAll abstraction is imagined. When someone uses the word God in this context, it's obvious the abstraction is about the root forces that cause reality to manifest. There is no controversy here.
- Retra 8y agoIf there is no controversy, then there is nothing being said.
- coldtea 8y agoThat's controversial. If there's no controversy, you can still say tautologies :-)
- squirrelicus 8y agoWat We can say things that aren't disagreements. We can even disagree without controversy.
- smhost 8y agoClearly, the controversy is about whether reality needs a cause in order to manifest.
- repsilat 8y agoProbably, though it could also be a way to say "The language in which algorithms from 'The Book'[1] are written." It would be fun if quantum computing were equivalent to classical (less fun -- probabilistic) models with comparable complexity, just more intuitive. I guess lots of complexity conjectures can be phrased that way, though -- P vs NP for sure. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_from_THE_BOOK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_from_THE_BOOK
- Retra 8y agoThere isn't any compelling reason to favor one person's fiction over another's. We can invoke memetic references to magic mechanisms all day long and accomplish little.
- repsilat 8y agoErm, that's a little abstract for me, but I guess you're saying that aesthetic judgements of programs aren't worth much from a theoretical perspective? If so, I'd say, - It didn't really seem like anyone in the comment thread was trying to make a "compelling" argument for anything -- we're just chatting here. - If we were interested in that sort of thing, we might note that minimal program size is a good measure of language complexity/information, and that "algorithms from the book" and different models of computation that might make programs easier to write are both "objectively interesting" from an information-theoretic standpoint. EDIT: oh wait, I get it, you weren't being constructive, you just came here to make fun of a religion nobody was talking about. Never mind.
- kybernetikos 8y agoI think 'nature' would be confusing here, since we also use it for the concrete, manifest nature. As used here, and in many other phrasings, and by analogy with religon, 'god' is probably meant to be the principles and forces underlying manifest nature.
- akvadrako 8y agoAnd if nature was a programmer, I don’t see how that’s different from god.
- qubex 8y agoIn your paradigm ”nature” is what ”god” ”programmed” with his ”quantum language”.
- akvadrako 8y agoNot really. I think nature = universe = god. Again, a bit speculative.
- PinkMilkshake 8y agoDeepak Chopra, is that you?
- extralego 8y agoI’d assert that nature == universe == god is an incredibly sober rationalization. As a literary interpretation, it’s acute.
- jonnybgood 8y agoMore like Baruch Spinoza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
- 8y ago
- QML 8y agoPerhaps they meant it in the sense that the Higgs Boson particle is sometimes referenced as the “god” particle. It works in the comparison that quantum computing often sensationalized by media.
- pharrington 8y agoWell yeah, quantum mechanics in general is the theory of quantized probabilistic physical systems, so it makes sense that apparently probabilistic systems with an apparent finite set of component states that can only discretely change in magnitude can be modeled with the theories that were developed to address precisely that. I suspect the cause of your surprise is actually inverted (as in, it's not surprising that alot of high level systems work like that, but rather that the most fundamental elements of matter/energy do.)
- selestify 8y agoBell's theorem says that no other theory with local hidden variables (which do away with randomness) can explain all the things QM explains.
- akvadrako 8y agoNot quite. A similar thing does surprise me; that quantum theory was discovered when researching particle physics and is only recently making inroads in other fields. That it applies to physics too is expected, because one way to characterise the quantum language is that it defines what one system can possibly do or say to another system. The source of those limitations is not yet completely clear, i.e. it hasn't been satisfactorily axiomized. But we can get close and it seems it's a logical restraint based around self-consistency. Assuming the universe must be self-consistent, it must also obey QM.
- analog31 8y agoI have to quibble a little bit, pointing specifically at psychology because it's first in your list. I don't know if there's an "official" demarcation for what comprises a quantum theory. But there's no psychological experiment or theory that hinges on the value of Planck's constant, or that demonstrates a shortcoming of classical mechanics.
- jl2718 8y agoBiology neither. Anybody that is telling you that quantum coherence properties are relevant for low energies states at room temperature is frankly uneducated in the matter.
- akvadrako 8y agoSome human behavior is more naturally modelled in QT than classical probability theory.¹ The major difference between quantum and classical is that you can have incompatible variables which don't have a shared probability space. Nothing to do with physics. Also, with natural units Plank's constant is 2π, so it does show up a lot. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.00418.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.00418.pdf
- asimpletune 8y agoI think you mean the “MIX” assembly language.
- api 8y agoIf we do end up finding a bunch of classical performance equivalents to quantum algorithms this could have huge implications for physics.
- jl2718 8y agoIm calling BS. We had ‘random projection’ long before anybody started dreaming up use cases for quantum. Seriously, people. When we realize that ‘quantum’ computing is really just ‘analog’, we’ll see a resurgence in that too. (Which is great actually, because modern analog computers are stunningly capable. And yes, they are the same thing when you realize that the hardware is exactly the same, and sampling away the noise has the same form as solving for decoherence.)
- ethn 8y agoThe laws of E&M generalized for Electrical Engineering can even be derived from quantum, BJT and several other equations historically were. Fortunately analog computing seems to be making a rudimentary comeback in the aspects they are actually good for.
- remcob 8y agoBut the converse is not true. The laws from Quantum Mechanics can not be derived from E&M. This means that the physics covered by QM is strictly larger than E&M. And as my former prof. R. Jozsa showed, this allows for Quantum algorithms that can not be matched by any classical algorithm (see Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm). Analog computers in their ideal form (known as real computers after the real numbers) are also strictly superior to classical computers. But unlike quantum computers, we know for sure that ideal analog computers can not exist. This also follows from QM. (Intuitively, real numbers don't exist in physics and everything ultimately becomes quantized)
- ethn 8y agoThat's not true, there are idealizations of ideal analog computers, such as the field computer model of analog computation†. We already have analog computations using continuous-time digital that can solve 32nd order differential equations in less than a millisecond††. We are also unaware of even the theoretical possibility of computation in QM. The noise and sampling problem hasn't been settled (see Kalai for a convincing argument); given the Quantum Threshold needed it becomes suspect when you have the equivalent of 1,000 CPU's for every individual CPU for just a .1% probability of error. Given your same line of reasoning, we are able to measure real numbers, in fact you can derive discrete numbers from real numbers while the converse is not true. Intuitively, discrete numbers don't exist and everything ultimately becomes real numbers. This is obviously a correct following of the stimulating rhetoric yet completely untrue. The ability of derivation from an axiom has nothing to do with the validity of the derivative representations. † https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1138111 https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1138111 †† https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7463004/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7463004/