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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

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?

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?