3 ms·

Better source: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5122 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i

• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  “ When I refereed the Science paper, I asked why the authors directly verified the results of their experiment only for up to 26-30 photons, relying on plausible extrapolations beyond that. While directly verifying the results of n-photon BosonSampling takes ~2n time for any known classical algorithm, I said, surely it should be possible with existing computers to go up to n=40 or n=50? A couple weeks later, the authors responded, saying that they’d now verified their results up to n=40, but it burned $400,000 worth of supercomputer time so they decided to stop there. This was by far the most expensive referee report I ever wrote!” Whoa!
  • JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
    How is something like that budgeted? The grants I worked on needed justification to buy extra Kimwipes it felt like. Certainly not 400k lying around in case you need it.
    • caf 6y ago
      I feel like the business case "this will let us get the paper into Science" probably stacks up pretty well.
      • dekhn 6y ago
        Many scientists burn millions of dollars to get a science paper.
    • oefrha 6y ago
      Given that this is supercomputer time we’re talking about, likely from a national computing center, I doubt they paid in cash or grant money for it. They probably have X amount of time pre-allotted, or managed to apply for some more. Then translated the compute spent on the problem to a dollar amount to illustrate the rough amount of resources spent.