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The “Talk”
- vanderZwan 7y agoApparently this was a collaboration with Scott Aaronson: > Drawn with great humility and thanks to one of my favorite people. Scott did all of the real work, and I threw in some dirty jokes. So, hey, a pretty good deal all around.
- _wzsf 7y ago> Apparently this was a collaboration with Scott Aaronson: Gee, I wish they'd mentioned that in the literal first panel of the comic.
- quickthrower2 7y agoHa ha - his blog tagline is "If you take just one piece of information from this blog: Quantum computers would not solve hard search problems instantaneously by simply trying all the possible solutions at once."
- triceratops 7y agoScott Aaronson is credited as the first author at the top of the comic. It's the first panel.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vanderZwan 7y agoSure, but that does not include the rest of the information of the comment I quoted
- tw1010 7y agoLearning that Scott Aaronson is collaborating with smbc comics makes me feel like people are having fun at parties I'm not invited to.
- prmph 7y agoInteresting comic, but yes it seems there are some dirty jokes thrown in this comic, at a deeper layer. I would like to know what they are
- SapporoChris 7y agoSo, I have a question. I found the 'article'... well comic, surprisingly easy to read and I think I learned something. However, my knowledge of quantum computing has mostly been based on articles that the comic was poking fun at. I've not had any formal education. So my question is, was this indeed a good educational comic, or does it just have a different set of problems from other articles on quantum computing?
- madhadron 7y agoIt was accurate and hilarious. I don't know how useful it is if you don't already know quantum mechanics. (Note: that's not the idiom of "I don't know" = "I doubt it". It's actually "I don't know." One thing I have learned over the years is that once you've rewired your brain for this stuff, you have no intuition for what exposition will actually work for someone who hasn't.)
- slowmovintarget 7y agoIt's like coming up with a metaphor for monads once you understand monads. OK, now I must ask forgiveness for using monads in an analogy.
- madhadron 7y agoI did not know until today that I needed an emoji that was both lol and angry.
- kingbirdy 7y agoScott Aaronson, co-author of the comic, is the director of the Quantum Information Center at UT Austin, and has a number of publications about quantum computing. His website has more qualifications: https://www.scottaaronson.com/ https://www.scottaaronson.com/.
- _asummers 7y agoHis book Quantum Computing Since Democritus is very good too.
- nthitz 7y agoFor those unaware, there's an extra "hidden secret" panel of the comic if you click the Red Button below the comic. :)
- alexeldeib 7y agoIs that a dig at Randall Munroe? Went back to click, pleasantly amused.
- bussierem 7y agoYes it is lol -- Zach (the comic creator) has a longstanding admiration and jealousy of Randall and XKCD's popularity, and references it occasionally.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoI suspect Randall may say "challenge accepted"...
- joshmarlow 7y agoI think they are friends. I seem to remember Munroe mentioning Weinersmith in something online a few years back.
- skykooler 7y agoI mean, he even drew a guest comic for XKCD: https://xkcd.com/826/ https://xkcd.com/826/
- kip_diskin 7y agoThis is a pretty good xckd reference https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/religion-ruining-everything-since-4004-bc https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/religion-ruining-everythin...
- mmanfrin 7y ago"Dig" implies malice, I think 'poke' or 'rib' is more precise. </pedantic>
- braindead_in 7y agoWhat about entaglement?
- knodi123 7y agoUm... ask your father.
- uwotm9 7y agoAccidentally clicked on an ad on the site at the bottom, trying to close it. It sent me to one of those, sites that hijacks the vibrate of your phone, and a back button that does nothing. If the creator of the comic is here -- please pick a more ethical ad provider.
- bagacrap 7y agoThat sounds like a failure of your web browser as much as anything. How on Earth is your phone vibrating without you granting a site notification permission? And recent versions of Chrome limit the degree to which history.pushState() can hijack your back button.
- mkl 7y ago> recent versions of Chrome limit the degree to which history.pushState() can hijack your back button. Really? How recent? All I can find are news articles from December last year saying they were working on it, but I've experienced the problem in the last month or so.
- bagacrap 7y agoShould have rolled out in Chrome 76[1] but it appears that work is ongoing as there are multiple ways for pages to interfere with navigation. [1] crrev.com/4e799c718a3580bbe13105075ae6b3e97fd1bc66
- uwotm9 7y agoUm, what? Did you look into this before posting? Here's a link that lets you toggle vibration, with code examples...... https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/vibration/ https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/vibration/
- bagacrap 7y agoNo, I didn't know about that api. Thanks for the link. I stand by the statement that it's a browser failure, though, as IMO that should be restricted by a permission and/or user action, but it appears to require neither.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago> Popular Scientism Heh.
- justinzollars 7y agoLittle known fact. Weinersmith. I went to high school with Kelly Smith who married Zach Weiner. They created Weinersmith.
- djsumdog 7y agoI remember looking up stuff on quantum computing a few years back. At the time a lot of the YouTube videos were by maths professors, and they were all very good and didn't skip on the complex maths (although I got the gist, a lot went over my head, but I knew I could probably get it if I reviewed all my polar/complex notation and maths). Some videos used some of the simulators that could simulate a few qbits. I remember that as you added qbits, the amount of ram you needed grew massively (exponentially?). Everything that could be done with a quantum machine could be done with a classical machine, it would just have larger space or time requirements. I feel like this comic tries to get across a lot of the higher level concepts without using the stupid analogies used in a lot of pop science articles. It's not necessary for understanding the actual maths, but it does help with larger concepts. It's honestly something I'd expect from PhD comics. I stopped reading both SMBC and PhD a while back; need to catch up on my RSS feeds :)
- sidcool 7y agoI have been fascinated how once we figure out the relationship between quantum mechanics and relativity, we will be Gods. Is it just a matter of misinterpretation? Is there no spooky action at distance?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- madhadron 7y ago> once we figure out the relationship between quantum mechanics and relativity, we will be Gods. Huh?
- emerongi 7y agoI feel like the author of that comment looks at it kind of like the discovery of the electron: once we learn how to control it, we can achieve things that were never possible before.
- gerbilly 7y agoI don't see that we'd be gods. I mean classical mechanics is well understood¹ but it's not like it allows people to move mountains and fly out the window at will etc... 1: Aside from the problem of turbulence.
- jerf 7y agoAt this point, it is not terribly likely that any such breakthrough is going to surprise us all that much at the engineering level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_principle If it does, I rather suspect it's going to take something like a Kardeshev level 2 [1] civilization to be able to take any advantage of it... and that may still not be enough. Learning isn't knowing isn't doing isn't engineering. To take a much, much simpler example, just because you very likely know the rules of chess does not make you a grandmaster. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
- aeternum 7y ago
- SamBam 7y ago> "Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent." Throwing shade at Roger Penrose there... (I recognized it because that has always been my precise take on all his books.)
- buboard 7y agoHahaha yeah that was the icing in the cake. I 'm sorry but you hear that argument so often it 's worthy of making fun of.
- aj7 7y agoSo how do you formulate a useful problem such that a quantum computer will have the amplitudes interfere to create the answer? Can the low number of Q-bit computers available factor small integers, for instance?
- Filligree 7y agoThat's a good question! And one we're still working on, though some books have been written. This question describes about half the field of quantum computing, so it isn't something I can answer in a post this size.
- bytecodes 7y agoCheck out Shor's algorithm for finding factors of a number. And yes, a low number of qubits can factor small numbers. https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.6758 https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.6758
- ilaksh 7y agoThat's just what I need, someone to lecture me patronizingly on a field like quantum computing which has absolutely zero practical utility at this point. If I was going to become some kind of researcher in the field, this is still the last thing I would want. Since I'm not a quantum computing researcher, it doesn't matter to me. Before someone in the thread happily starts on their own condescending lecture, yes, I DO know that IF quantum computing becomes useful that it will massively change computing.
- rout39574 7y agoLots of folks take joy in understanding things. Perhaps if you toss out your bowl of cornflakes and pour it again, that funny taste will go away.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y agoElsewhere a feline researcher furiously burns another anthology of Garfield
- pengstrom 7y agoI can't recommend SMBC enough. It's clever, insightful and just plain funny. The Superman one always gets me: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13 Do you have any favorites?
- personjerry 7y agoThis was surprisingly educational and incredibly approachable.
- transitionnel 7y agoGreat comic! How I visualize this stuff is really simple, and so far it doesn't seem to be wrong... Imagine 2 tennis balls floating in space, each spinning in some direction at some speed. The quantum amplitude is the extent to which they are matched, or opposed, when you break down the inertia of each into vectors. In fact I'm pretty sure their measurements are very limited in the extent to which they can measure these things to infinite precision. (Duh) Is this another case of obfuscation by academics? This is truly not complicated. It's even kinda fun. I think we all have a little fear of being mentally outgunned, and fear does what it's always done to creative thought. Dominated it.
- kmill 7y agoI'm wondering what you mean by "doesn't seem to be wrong" -- are you doing any calculations? I'm not able to follow exactly what you mean by the quantum amplitude coming from a pair of tennis balls. My understanding of the spin of a particle is that it turns out, roughly speaking, your spinning tennis ball needs to keep track of a vector along the axis of rotation. This has something to do with the unit vectors in 2D Hilbert space having a correspondence to the group SU(2) (where remembering only the axis is the classical case of SO(3)). Somehow, if you were to take your quantum spinning tennis ball and, by some mechanism (magnetic fields?), slowly rotate its axis by 360 degrees, its spin becomes negative of what it originally was and it can destructively interfere with a tennis ball in the original state. Is this the sort of thing the pair of tennis balls is meant to deal with? Something I really don't understand is how angular momentum is meant to work... I would have thought it's a Lie algebra thing, but SU(2) and SO(3) have isomorphic Lie algebras. Disclosure: I don't know any quantum mechanics, just some math.
- transitionnel 7y agoVery cool, I had not seen Lie algebras before. More fuel for the organic AI ;-). Your description sounds perfectly accurate; uberdelicate electromagnetic manipulation would be the first logical approach. ...Actually Gizmodo just did an article on "Sycamore" a few days ago! Great read. - Perhaps after the microwave pulses they can get even higher resolution by shining very bright images on it.?
- mey 7y agoAs a SE, what is a problem quantum computers would be ideal to solve over a more traditional computer (CPU/gpu/fpga/etc)? Please challenge my current assumptions - Would not be Turing complete - More qubits are needed for practical applications - Practical application in cracking crypto I know if I fully understood the how, I might be able to answer the above, but would love some expert opinions.
- MauranKilom 7y agoI'm not qualified to answer, but just wanted to let you know that I found this post hard to parse. The last point is a constraint and not an assumption, but the others are. The second point is not a property of a problem, but the others are. They also all have different moods. And I don't know what "SE" is in this context.
- pmiller2 7y agoThis inspired me to submit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380480 . It's a fairly short (34 page) introduction to QM from a mathematical POV, emphasizing QM as a generalization of classical probability.
- nickelcitymario 7y agoI'm not ashamed to admit this was entirely new to me. I've been listening to the wrong people.
- reilly3000 7y agoHow he managed to make quantum mechanics so ...titillating was quite a feat.
- yalogin 7y agoI, just like the comic says, read a few of those blogs that say QC is like operations done in parallel and I really believed that. Are there some good links out there for someone to understand the concept in a bit more depth.
- emnalyeriar 7y agoIs this the article the author mentions? https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-...
- fragmede 7y ago(Note that this was posted December 14, 2016)
- kyle-rb 7y agoAnother recent SMBC was about the Elitzur Vaidman bomb tester, which I had never heard of before, and after staring at Wikipedia for a while, I have a somewhat better understanding of what quantum interference means, and sort of proved to myself that all this quantum stuff is actually real/has potential useful applications. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/duuude https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/duuude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_tester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_t...
- hnspirit 7y agoI'll just be the one to do it... this is based on a particular type of understanding of quantum mechanics in regards to using a quantum system as a measurement of a result, as opposed to treating particles influencing a quantum field. I feel that while it's amusing from a computing or mathematics standpoint, it does not address adequately the biological aspects of the quantum world. Such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling But I would like to be proven wrong.
- sundarurfriend 7y agoFor anyone who's curious about what quantum computing actually is, I recommend Quantum Computing for the Very Curious [1]. Most articles online either get it wrong in the "free parallelism for everybody!" way that the comic warns about, or just scratches the surface and vaguely indicates that that's not what's going on (like the comic itself does). QCVC was what made me finally feel like I actually had a little foothold in QC land in the sense of slightly understanding what people do when they do quantum computing. It's pretty long but a pretty easy read. [1] https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc
- adultSwim 7y agoNeat! This is like programming with monads