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I wish I understood enough QM to understand this comment! Any suggestions for where I might learn about GHZ states and the like?

uuidgen 5y ago
If you want to understand math behind Quantum Mechanic and Quantum Computing I think this is a great resource: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4805 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4805
crdrost 5y ago
So GHZ is just a name for a specific arrangement that is maximally entangled. John Preskill has some lectures on quantum computing for the University of Waterloo I believe, also a Hans Bethe lecture at Cornell. If you are just looking for an hour's commitment to understand a little better, I would go with one of those. If you wanted an actual textbook, Nielsen and Chuang is very popular... The other place I would look would be OpenCourseWare, you might be able to find some good problems to work on there. Sometimes video lectures can be good if you can pause the video right after a problem was introduced and try to solve it yourself before you get the answer from the professor. The difficulty in being an autodidact is, listening to stories around a campfire is deep in our bones, it makes us feel good. But it's not a very efficient way to learn. So there is a mismatch where watching a TED talk feels like you have just changed everything, but then if I come to you a month later probably nothing has changed. Text is a lot faster, as a medium. Way slower to write but seekable, skimmable, can contain links to previous sections... I'm pretty sure we also retain more of it. But that's not the main problem with videos/TED talks. Like, the text form of TED talks is someone telling you how monads are burritos and that makes it all better. It's too clean? Good learning is messy. A good abstraction allows you to clean up a mess of confusion in your head. This confused mess can only exist if you have created it. So you have to do lots of examples, exercises, memorize strange times when you have been wrong about things and your expectations don't align with the problem domain... If you think about learning a language, there is that phase where you don't know which thing to use when and your words are all out of order in the sentence... Per Ira Glass the only way to improve is to do lots of work, put yourself on a schedule, grind through mediocrity. The TED talk/monad tutorial fallacy is that we can give our children an easier time than we had it. It's BS. We can't. “I made so many mistakes, I will help you so that you don't have to deal with that pain” blithely unaware that the pain was how you learned it, that learning is pain. Sorry, didn't mean to rant and now it seems awkward to delete it.

uuidgen 5y ago

If you want to understand math behind Quantum Mechanic and Quantum Computing I think this is a great resource: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4805 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4805

crdrost 5y ago

So GHZ is just a name for a specific arrangement that is maximally entangled. John Preskill has some lectures on quantum computing for the University of Waterloo I believe, also a Hans Bethe lecture at Cornell. If you are just looking for an hour's commitment to understand a little better, I would go with one of those. If you wanted an actual textbook, Nielsen and Chuang is very popular... The other place I would look would be OpenCourseWare, you might be able to find some good problems to work on there. Sometimes video lectures can be good if you can pause the video right after a problem was introduced and try to solve it yourself before you get the answer from the professor. The difficulty in being an autodidact is, listening to stories around a campfire is deep in our bones, it makes us feel good. But it's not a very efficient way to learn. So there is a mismatch where watching a TED talk feels like you have just changed everything, but then if I come to you a month later probably nothing has changed. Text is a lot faster, as a medium. Way slower to write but seekable, skimmable, can contain links to previous sections... I'm pretty sure we also retain more of it. But that's not the main problem with videos/TED talks. Like, the text form of TED talks is someone telling you how monads are burritos and that makes it all better. It's too clean? Good learning is messy. A good abstraction allows you to clean up a mess of confusion in your head. This confused mess can only exist if you have created it. So you have to do lots of examples, exercises, memorize strange times when you have been wrong about things and your expectations don't align with the problem domain... If you think about learning a language, there is that phase where you don't know which thing to use when and your words are all out of order in the sentence... Per Ira Glass the only way to improve is to do lots of work, put yourself on a schedule, grind through mediocrity. The TED talk/monad tutorial fallacy is that we can give our children an easier time than we had it. It's BS. We can't. “I made so many mistakes, I will help you so that you don't have to deal with that pain” blithely unaware that the pain was how you learned it, that learning is pain. Sorry, didn't mean to rant and now it seems awkward to delete it.