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Physicists here. I'm having a hard time believing that you read it carefully, because that's the Childs preprint, which is only mentioned "in passing", and the

by tagrun 6y ago

Physicists here. I'm having a hard time believing that you read it carefully, because that's the Childs preprint, which is only mentioned "in passing", and the true focus of this new article is the Palmer (MIT) preprint, which is about mapping nonlinear differential equations to nonlinear Bose-Einstein condensates. BECs are modeled by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, which contains a potential term that is proportional to particle density (basically a potential that depends on the wavefunction), causing nonlinearity. From the news article: > The MIT-led paper took a different approach. It modeled any nonlinear problem as a Bose-Einstein condensate. This is a state of matter where interactions within an ultracold group of particles cause each individual particle to behave identically. Since the particles are all interconnected, each particle’s behavior influences the rest, feeding back to that particle in a loop characteristic of nonlinearity.

prof-dr-ir 6y ago
There are two paragraphs dedicated to the Childs preprint and then two to the Palmer preprint. As far as I can see, the rest of the article consistently refers to 'both papers'. So I do not think it reasonable to claim that the Childs preprint 'is only mentioned in passing'. Second, you missed a key quote: "So by imagining a pseudo Bose-Einstein condensate tailor made for each nonlinear problem, this algorithm deduces a useful linear approximation." From this I conclude that the MIT paper does reduce the computation to a linear system after all, as OP suggested. Third, let me offer some unsolicited feedback on the tone of your comment: the phrase "I'm having a hard time believing that you read it carefully" came across as needlessly off-putting to me.
- tagrun 6y ago
  I'll give you that it's a rather long passing, but title and the overall news article is actually about Palmer's work, and Childs paper is "in passing" in the sense that it's a relevant recent work that parallels Palmer's work ---I don't believe Childs preprint would be newsworthy on its own. Regarding the editorial "key qoute", if you read the preprint https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.06571.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.06571.pdf you can see this conflates two things: the mapping of nonlinear differential equations onto BECs, and the emulation of a BEC on a typical quantum computer (which introduces additional limitations). Note that the latter step isn't truly necessary, because one can use a BEC directly to do it. Third, I'm sorry about how you feel about it, but I stand by my dissent that this can be a coherent statement: > and after reading the article more carefully, I'm still not sure how QC has any effect on the chaotic nature of non-linear diffeqs . All I see in here is that they're trying to map non-linear diffeqs to linear systems via approximations so they can run it on a QC. which mischaracterizes Palmer's work at best. I don't believe anyone would be happy to have their work (be it physics or software development) disparaged like this, would you?
gnulinux 6y ago
> I'm having a hard time believing that you read it carefully Excuse me, but I find this uncalled for. Not everyone has a formal physics education. People who last studied physics in high school 10 years ago will make mistakes even if they read things carefully.

by tagrun 6y ago

prof-dr-ir 6y ago

There are two paragraphs dedicated to the Childs preprint and then two to the Palmer preprint. As far as I can see, the rest of the article consistently refers to 'both papers'. So I do not think it reasonable to claim that the Childs preprint 'is only mentioned in passing'. Second, you missed a key quote: "So by imagining a pseudo Bose-Einstein condensate tailor made for each nonlinear problem, this algorithm deduces a useful linear approximation." From this I conclude that the MIT paper does reduce the computation to a linear system after all, as OP suggested. Third, let me offer some unsolicited feedback on the tone of your comment: the phrase "I'm having a hard time believing that you read it carefully" came across as needlessly off-putting to me.

tagrun 6y ago
I'll give you that it's a rather long passing, but title and the overall news article is actually about Palmer's work, and Childs paper is "in passing" in the sense that it's a relevant recent work that parallels Palmer's work ---I don't believe Childs preprint would be newsworthy on its own. Regarding the editorial "key qoute", if you read the preprint https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.06571.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.06571.pdf you can see this conflates two things: the mapping of nonlinear differential equations onto BECs, and the emulation of a BEC on a typical quantum computer (which introduces additional limitations). Note that the latter step isn't truly necessary, because one can use a BEC directly to do it. Third, I'm sorry about how you feel about it, but I stand by my dissent that this can be a coherent statement: > and after reading the article more carefully, I'm still not sure how QC has any effect on the chaotic nature of non-linear diffeqs . All I see in here is that they're trying to map non-linear diffeqs to linear systems via approximations so they can run it on a QC. which mischaracterizes Palmer's work at best. I don't believe anyone would be happy to have their work (be it physics or software development) disparaged like this, would you?

gnulinux 6y ago

> I'm having a hard time believing that you read it carefully Excuse me, but I find this uncalled for. Not everyone has a formal physics education. People who last studied physics in high school 10 years ago will make mistakes even if they read things carefully.