14 ms·

Computer science proof unveils unexpected form of entanglement

106 points by theafh 4y ago

gautamcgoel 4y ago
It's funny to see this on the front page of HN. I knew Chinmay (one of the authors of the paper) back when he was an undergrad at Caltech. Super cool dude - I knew he'd go on to do great stuff! Very happy for the team that obtained this result.
- a1pulley 4y ago
  Chinmay was a TA for CS38—the required algorithms class for the computer science major at Caltech. I saved that class for the final quarter of my senior year. After finishing my last exam, I drove up to the Eastern Sierra to hike Caltech Peak to celebrate my (presumed) graduation; I was gone for a few days. When I returned and checked my email, I saw that my CS38 exam had been graded but that I didn't yet have a grade for the class. On problem 2, Chinmay underlined my use of the royal "we" and told me to report myself to the the Caltech honor code committee if I'd taken the take-home exam with anyone else. I got a good chuckle out of that one. I tanked that question—1 out of 6 points!—so I wondered whether he thought I was part of the dumbing cheating group in history.
  - dghughes 4y ago
    > On problem 2, Chinmay underlined my use of the royal "we" I've heard that you can only use we if you are The Queen, an editor, or if you have a tapeworm.
    - jakear 4y ago
      My gut bacteria and I beg to differ! We have a grand old time working together to keep me conscious. https://www.scientificanimations.com/how-gut-bacteria-impact-human-emotions https://www.scientificanimations.com/how-gut-bacteria-impact...
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    You could leave it that long? I tried doing it freshman or sophomore year as a non major with predictable results.
  - nirkhe 4y ago
    Haha — Chinmay here. Oh goodness I remember this! What actually happened is that there were two sols. submitted that we’re similar enough that we were concerned about cheating — both used the royal “we”. And the weird part was that very few people used royal “we” on that problem. The two were not direct copies so we thought we should just ask the submitters to self report to BoC rather than deal with an official report. Sorry if I insinuated you were cheating falsely!
    - a1pulley 4y ago
      No worries. I unfortunately had to make my own cheating accusations when I TA'd other classes... Reading some of these old proofs is a little cringe-inducing. Masking cluelessness with the royal we doesn't work very well :-)
gigatexal 4y ago
“ The three authors of the new paper, who had been collaborating on related projects over the past two years, came together to prove that one of the new codes had all the properties needed to make a quantum system of the sort that Freedman and Hastings had hypothesized. In so doing, they proved the NLTS conjecture. Their result demonstrates that entanglement is not necessarily as fragile and sensitive to temperature as physicists thought. And it supports the quantum PCP conjecture, suggesting that even away from the ground energy, a quantum system’s energy can remain virtually impossible to calculate. “It tells us that the thing that seemed unlikely to be true is true,” said Isaac Kim of the University of California, Davis. “Albeit in some very weird system.””
Maursault 4y ago
I always said that computer science was going to be the method to complete physics, whether it be finishing the Standard Model or proving finally Dark Matter is fiction, which is why we can't detect it. Maybe it's still not entirely clear, but just trust me.
- SpaceManNabs 4y ago
  > proving finally Dark Matter is fiction > Maybe it's still not entirely clear, but just trust me. I honestly can't tell if your comment is satire. If it is, it is pretty good.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Why? Dark matter is a mass measurement anomaly. One way to solve the problem is to show that the original calculations were not anomalous.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    You know its satire by the way it makes you feel.
- galcerte 4y ago
  When all you have is a hammer...
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  So actually conducting scientific observations, with computers as the instrument?
  - Maursault 4y ago
    The computer hosts the models. Observing and experimenting with or in digital models reveal physics effectively unattainable with traditional models or real world observation and experimentation.
- sidlls 4y ago
  Good lord no, just no. Computer Science is not going to be the method to "complete physics." "Complete physics" isn't even a sensible phrase. Source: me, (former) physicist.
gavinray 4y ago
Is there anyone present who understands this? I'd like to ask a question: My view on life is that it's deterministic. The mental analogy I've come up with is this: "If you were to roll a set of marbles down a hill, the outcome and trajectory would be identical no matter how many times you repeated the experiment given the same marble shapes and initial force." Where the marbles here are an analogy for our genetics, and the hill + initial force our environment. Reading the thought experiment it sounds like a similar analogy: > "Run a bath, then dump a bunch of floating bar magnets into the water. Each magnet will flip its orientation back and forth, trying to align with its neighbors. It will push and pull on the other magnets and get pushed and pulled in return. Now try to answer this: What will be the system’s final arrangement?" > "This problem and others like it, it turns out, are impossibly complicated." Can someone explain why this is "impossibly complicated?" Isn't it deterministic and calculable?
- gostsamo 4y ago
  Small differences in the initial conditions can bring big differences in the final result. This is the main postulate of chaos theory started with one Edward Lorenz and giving birth to stuff like the butterfly effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
  - omegalulw 4y ago
    This is part of the answer. The other part being that there seems to be fundamental non determinism in our universe.
    - seibelj 4y ago
      I agree - it is obvious to me that free will = non-determinism. But we are getting into metaphysics and unprovable thought experiments
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      Most likely but it depends on your interpretation of quantum mechanics. I believe in non determinism but that’s mainly a hunch

106 points by theafh 4y ago

It's funny to see this on the front page of HN. I knew Chinmay (one of the authors of the paper) back when he was an undergrad at Caltech. Super cool dude - I knew he'd go on to do great stuff! Very happy for the team that obtained this result.

a1pulley 4y ago
Chinmay was a TA for CS38—the required algorithms class for the computer science major at Caltech. I saved that class for the final quarter of my senior year. After finishing my last exam, I drove up to the Eastern Sierra to hike Caltech Peak to celebrate my (presumed) graduation; I was gone for a few days. When I returned and checked my email, I saw that my CS38 exam had been graded but that I didn't yet have a grade for the class. On problem 2, Chinmay underlined my use of the royal "we" and told me to report myself to the the Caltech honor code committee if I'd taken the take-home exam with anyone else. I got a good chuckle out of that one. I tanked that question—1 out of 6 points!—so I wondered whether he thought I was part of the dumbing cheating group in history.
- dghughes 4y ago
  > On problem 2, Chinmay underlined my use of the royal "we" I've heard that you can only use we if you are The Queen, an editor, or if you have a tapeworm.
  - jakear 4y ago
    My gut bacteria and I beg to differ! We have a grand old time working together to keep me conscious. https://www.scientificanimations.com/how-gut-bacteria-impact-human-emotions https://www.scientificanimations.com/how-gut-bacteria-impact...
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  You could leave it that long? I tried doing it freshman or sophomore year as a non major with predictable results.
- nirkhe 4y ago
  Haha — Chinmay here. Oh goodness I remember this! What actually happened is that there were two sols. submitted that we’re similar enough that we were concerned about cheating — both used the royal “we”. And the weird part was that very few people used royal “we” on that problem. The two were not direct copies so we thought we should just ask the submitters to self report to BoC rather than deal with an official report. Sorry if I insinuated you were cheating falsely!
  - a1pulley 4y ago
    No worries. I unfortunately had to make my own cheating accusations when I TA'd other classes... Reading some of these old proofs is a little cringe-inducing. Masking cluelessness with the royal we doesn't work very well :-)

gigatexal 4y ago

“ The three authors of the new paper, who had been collaborating on related projects over the past two years, came together to prove that one of the new codes had all the properties needed to make a quantum system of the sort that Freedman and Hastings had hypothesized. In so doing, they proved the NLTS conjecture. Their result demonstrates that entanglement is not necessarily as fragile and sensitive to temperature as physicists thought. And it supports the quantum PCP conjecture, suggesting that even away from the ground energy, a quantum system’s energy can remain virtually impossible to calculate. “It tells us that the thing that seemed unlikely to be true is true,” said Isaac Kim of the University of California, Davis. “Albeit in some very weird system.””

Maursault 4y ago

I always said that computer science was going to be the method to complete physics, whether it be finishing the Standard Model or proving finally Dark Matter is fiction, which is why we can't detect it. Maybe it's still not entirely clear, but just trust me.

SpaceManNabs 4y ago
> proving finally Dark Matter is fiction > Maybe it's still not entirely clear, but just trust me. I honestly can't tell if your comment is satire. If it is, it is pretty good.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Why? Dark matter is a mass measurement anomaly. One way to solve the problem is to show that the original calculations were not anomalous.
- peteradio 4y ago
  You know its satire by the way it makes you feel.
galcerte 4y ago
When all you have is a hammer...
Apocryphon 4y ago
So actually conducting scientific observations, with computers as the instrument?
- Maursault 4y ago
  The computer hosts the models. Observing and experimenting with or in digital models reveal physics effectively unattainable with traditional models or real world observation and experimentation.
sidlls 4y ago
Good lord no, just no. Computer Science is not going to be the method to "complete physics." "Complete physics" isn't even a sensible phrase. Source: me, (former) physicist.

gavinray 4y ago

Is there anyone present who understands this? I'd like to ask a question: My view on life is that it's deterministic. The mental analogy I've come up with is this: "If you were to roll a set of marbles down a hill, the outcome and trajectory would be identical no matter how many times you repeated the experiment given the same marble shapes and initial force." Where the marbles here are an analogy for our genetics, and the hill + initial force our environment. Reading the thought experiment it sounds like a similar analogy: > "Run a bath, then dump a bunch of floating bar magnets into the water. Each magnet will flip its orientation back and forth, trying to align with its neighbors. It will push and pull on the other magnets and get pushed and pulled in return. Now try to answer this: What will be the system’s final arrangement?" > "This problem and others like it, it turns out, are impossibly complicated." Can someone explain why this is "impossibly complicated?" Isn't it deterministic and calculable?

gostsamo 4y ago
Small differences in the initial conditions can bring big differences in the final result. This is the main postulate of chaos theory started with one Edward Lorenz and giving birth to stuff like the butterfly effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
- omegalulw 4y ago
  This is part of the answer. The other part being that there seems to be fundamental non determinism in our universe.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    I agree - it is obvious to me that free will = non-determinism. But we are getting into metaphysics and unprovable thought experiments
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Most likely but it depends on your interpretation of quantum mechanics. I believe in non determinism but that’s mainly a hunch