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> It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse I see the evid
by jawns 2y ago
> It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse
I see the evidence, and I see the conclusion, but there's a lot of ellipses between the evidence and the conclusion.
Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing capacity from other universes for these calculations?
- gaze 2y agoI'm upset they put this in because this is absolutely not the view of most quantum foundations researchers.
- whimsicalism 2y agothe everettian view is absolutely not the view? i am not so sure. or you mean specifically the parallel computation view?
- gaze 2y agosorry -- the results don't add weight to one view or the other. The interpretations are equivalent.
- whimsicalism 2y agonot metaphysically equivalent. also, i’m not so certain it will always be untestable. i would have thought the same thing about hidden variables but i underestimated the cleverness of experimentalists
- DennisP 2y agoI think "experimentally equivalent" is what GP meant, and as of today, it holds true. Google's results are predicted by other interpretations just as well as by Everett. Maybe someday there will be a clever experiment to distinguish the models but just "we have a good QC" is not that.
- whimsicalism 2y agoi think you're arguing against a point i never made in any of my comments
- wasabi991011 2y agoIn my opinion the "shut up and calculate" view is the most common among actual quantum computing researchers. Unsure about those working on quantum foundations, but I think the absence of consensus is enough to claim any view as absolutely not the view.
- whimsicalism 2y agoi don’t really view “shut up and calculate” or very restrained copenhagenism as a real view at all. i think if you were to ask people to make a real metaphysical speculation, majority might be partial to everett - especially if they felt confident the results were anonymous
- wasabi991011 2y agoI agree, but that kind of goes to my point: I believe the vast majority of researchers in quantum computing* spend almost no time on metaphysical speculation, *Well, those on the "practical side" that thinks about algorithms and engineering quantum systems like the Google Quantum AI team and others. Not the computer science theorists knee-deep in quantum computational complexity proofs nor physics theorists working on foundations of quantum mechanics. But these last two categories are outnumbered by the "practical" side.
- spookie 2y agoSeeing to believe is indeed a view, as they would have to view it in order to believe!
- klipt 2y agoSoon: "are alien universes slowing down your internet? Click here to learn more!" Reminds me of the Aorist Rods from Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.
- rafram 2y agoWell there has to be some reason I'm not getting the "gigabit" speeds I was quoted.
- duderific 2y agoYou were probably quoted "up to" gigabit speed. Which means anything from zero to gigabit is acceptable.
- sebastiennight 2y agoAre negative speeds acceptable too?
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- ColinHayhurst 2y agoCredibility of the article plummeted when I got to that sentence, and especially since using name dropping.
- ferfumarma 2y agoOne of the biggest problems with such an assertion is that it's not falsifiable. It could be that we are borrowing qbit processing power from Russel's quantum teapot.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoScience is not based on consensus seeking. Science is about coming up with the best explanations irrespective of whether or not a large chunk does not believe it. And best explanations are the ones that is hard to vary. Not the one that is most widely accepted or easy to accept based on the current world view.
- jayd16 2y agoActually it is exactly based on hypotheses that are verified.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoAnd how do you verify hypothesis? What is the process to do that?
- fwip 2y agoYou use the hypotheses to make predictions and design experiments. Then you carry those out and see if they support the hypothesis. Or is this one of those rhetorical questions?
- hshshshshsh 2y agoOkay. I have a hypothesis that the rain is controlled by a god called Ringo. If you pray to Ringo and he listens to your prayer it will rain in next 24 hours. If he doesn't listen it won't rain. You can also test this experimentally by praying and observing the outcomes.
- kelnos 2y agoI assume this is a rhetorical question, since you are perfectly capable of doing a search for "the scientific method" on your own. MWI has not led to any verifiably-correct predictions, has it? At least not any that other interpretations can also predict, and have other, better properties.
- JanisErdmanis 2y ago
- justinpombrio 2y agoFrom Wikipedia[1]: A poll of 72 "leading quantum cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" conducted before 1991 by L. David Raub showed 58% agreement with "Yes, I think MWI is true".[85] Max Tegmark reports the result of a "highly unscientific" poll taken at a 1997 quantum mechanics workshop. According to Tegmark, "The many worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second, comfortably ahead of the consistent histories and Bohm interpretations."[86] In response to Sean M. Carroll's statement "As crazy as it sounds, most working physicists buy into the many-worlds theory",[87] Michael Nielsen counters: "at a quantum computing conference at Cambridge in 1998, a many-worlder surveyed the audience of approximately 200 people... Many-worlds did just fine, garnering support on a level comparable to, but somewhat below, Copenhagen and decoherence." But Nielsen notes that it seemed most attendees found it to be a waste of time: Peres "got a huge and sustained round of applause…when he got up at the end of the polling and asked 'And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?'"[88] A 2005 poll of fewer than 40 students and researchers taken after a course on the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics at the Institute for Quantum Computing University of Waterloo found "Many Worlds (and decoherence)" to be the least favored.[89] A 2011 poll of 33 participants at an Austrian conference on quantum foundations found 6 endorsed MWI, 8 "Information-based/information-theoretical", and 14 Copenhagen;[90] the authors remark that MWI received a similar percentage of votes as in Tegmark's 1997 poll.[90] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation#Polls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation#Pol...
- whimsicalism 2y agoi think if these polls were anonymous, copenhagen would lose share. there's a reason why MWI is disproportionately popular among people who basically have no professional worries because they are already uber-distinguished.
- korkybuchek 2y ago> Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing capacity from other universes for these calculations? Tangentially related, but there's a great Asimov book about this called The Gods Themselves (fiction).
- vessenes 2y agoI’m partial to Anathem by Stephenson on this topic as well
- korkybuchek 2y agoThanks for the recommendation!
- wasabi991011 2y agoI was also really taken aback by this quote. I have no idea who put it there, but I can assure you the actual paper contains no such nonsense. I would have thought whoever writes the google tech blogs is more competent than bottom tier science journalists. But in this case I think it is more reasonable to assume malice, as the post is authored by the Google Quantum AI Lead, and makes more sense as hype-boosting buzzword bullshit than as an honest misunderstanding that was not caught during editing.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoQuantum computation done in done multiple universes is the explanation given by David Deutsch the father of Quantum Computing. He invented the idea of a quantum computer to test the idea of parallel universes. If you are okay with a single universe coming to existence out of nothing you should be able to handle parallel universes as well just fine. Also your comment does not have any useful information. You assumed hype as the reason why they mentioned parallel computing. It's just a bias you have on looking at world. Hype does helps explain a lot of things. So it can be tempting to use it as a placeholder for anything that you don't accept based on your current set of beliefs.
- wasabi991011 2y agoI disagree that it is "the best explanation we have". It's a nice theory, but like all theories in quantum foundations / interpretations of quantum mechanics, it is (at least currently) unfalsifiable. I didn't "assume" hype, I hypothesized it based on the evidence before me: There is nothing in Google's paper that deals with interpretations of quantum mechanics. This only appears in the blog post, with no evidence given. And there is nothing google is doing with it's quantum chip that would discriminate between interpretations of QM, so it is simply false that "It lends credence to ... parallel universes" over another interpretation.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoFrom what I understand, David Deutsch invented the idea of quantum computer as a way to test Parallel Universes. And later people went on and built the quantum computer. Are you saying that the implementation of a quantum computer does not require any kind of assumption on computations being run in parallel universes?
- ComputerGuru 2y agoIt doesn’t make sense to me because if we can borrow capacity to perform calculations then we can “borrow” an infinite amount of energy.
- griomnib 2y agoClimate change solved: steal energy from adjacent universes, pipe our carbon waste into theirs.
- danielbln 2y agoRemind me of The Expanse, where the ring space is syphoning energy from some other universe to keep the gates open.
- kridsdale1 2y agoIt’s “out of the environment”.
- griomnib 2y agoWe’re taking negative externalities to a whole new dimension!
- FridgeSeal 2y agoThere’s a fun short story in qntm’s “Valuable Humans In Transit” about a scenario like this.
- rdtsc 2y ago> It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. That's in line with a religious belief. One camp believes one thing, other believes something else, others refuse to participate and say "shut up and calculate". Nothing wrong with religious beliefs of course, it's just important to know that is what it is.
- paxys 2y agoI don't understand the jump from: classical algorithm takes time A -> quantum algorithm takes time B -> (A - B) must be borrowed from a parallel universe. Maybe A wasn't the most efficient algorithm for this universe to begin with?
- kelnos 2y agoRight, and that's part of the argument against quantum computing being a proof (or disproof) of the many-worlds interpretation. Sure, "(A-B) was borrowed from parallel universes" is a possible explanation for why quantum computing can be so fast, but it's by far not the only possible explanation.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoI suspect the real issue is that Big Tech investors and executives (including Sundar Pichai) are utterly hopped up on sci-fi, and this sort of stuff convinces them to dedicate resources to quantum computing.
- kridsdale1 2y agoThat explains metaverse funding at least.
- ko27 2y agoIt's a perfectly legit interpretation of what's happening, and many physicists share the same opinion. Of course the big caveat is that you need to interfere those worlds so that they cancel out, which necessarily requires a lower algorithmic bound which prevents you from doing infinite amount of computation in an instant.
- melvinmelih 2y ago> It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. If it's not, what would be your explanation for this significant improvement then?
- Ar-Curunir 2y agoI mean, that's like saying GPUs operate in parallel universes because they can do certain things thousands of times faster than CPUs.
- shawabawa3 2y agoQuantum computing can perform certain calculations much faster than classical computing in the same way classical computing can perform certain calculations much faster than an abacus
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- johnfn 2y agoYou don't even have to get to the point where you're reading a post off Scott Aaronson's blog[1] at all; his headline says "If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel." [1]: https://scottaaronson.blog/ https://scottaaronson.blog/
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoIn the same way people believe P != NP, most quantum computing people believe BQP != NP, and NP-complete problems will still take exponential time on quantum computers. But if we had access to arbitrary parallel universes then presumably that shouldn't be an issue. The success on the random (quantum) circuit problem is really a valdiation of Feynman's idea, not Deutsch: classical computers need 2^n bits to simulate n qubits, so we will need quantum computers to efficiently simulate quantum phenomena.
- jumping_frog 2y agoDoes access to arbitrary parallel universes imply that they divide up the computation and the correct answer is distributed to all of the universes or in such a collection, there will be sucker universes which will always receive wrong answers ?
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoGood question! The whole magic of quantum computation versus parallel computation is that the “universe” probabilities interfere with each other so that wrong answers cancel each other out. So I suppose the wrong ”universes” still exist somewhere. But it’s a whole lot less confusing if you view QC as taking place in one universe which is fundamentally probabilistic.
- GenerWork 2y ago>Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing capacity from other universes for these calculations? Doesn't this also mean that other universes have civilizations that could potentially borrow capacity from our universe, and if so, what would that look like?
- hshshshshsh 2y agoThe quantum computer idea was literally invented by David Deutsche to test the many universes theory of quantum physics.
- wasabi991011 2y agoYou've mentioned this in another comment. I have to point out, even if this is his opinion, and he has been influential in the field, it does not mean that this specific idea of his has been influential.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoSorry. I don't care whether an idea was influential or not. All I care is whether someone has a better explanation.
- wasabi991011 2y agoI'll remind you of the quote that started this thread: "Do quantum computing folks really think that we are borrowing capacity from other universes for these calculations?" In this context, your opinion and Deutsch's opinion don't matter. The question is about whether the idea is common in the field or not.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoOkay. I just don't understand. Are you saying Quantum Computers are also implemented without assuming the computations run in parallel universe?
- Vecr 2y agoI don't know what he's saying, but I'm saying that the answer to your question is "Yes," unless quantum computers behave differently than expected.
- wasabi991011 2y ago
- killerstorm 2y agoEverett interpretation simply asserts that quantum wavefunctions are real and there's no such thing as "wavefunction collapse". It's the simplest interpretation. People call it "many worlds" because we can interact only with a tiny fraction of the wavefunction at a time, i.e. other "branches" which are practically out of reach might be considered "parallel universes". But it would be more correct to say that it's just one universe which is much more complex than what it looks like to our eyes. Quantum computers are able to tap into this complexity. They make a more complete use of the universe we are in.
- tobias2014 2y agoThis might turn into a debate of defining "simplest", but I think the ensemble/statistical interpretation is really the most minimal in terms of fancy ideas or concepts like "wavefunction collapse" or "multiverses". It doesn't need a wavefunction collapse nor does it need multiverses.
- layer8 2y agoThe Schrödinger equation inherently contains a multiverse. The disagreement is about whether the wave function described by the equation collapses to a single universe upon measurement (i.e. whether the equation stops holding upon measurement), or whether the different branches continue to exist (i.e. the equation continues to hold at all times), each with a different measurement outcome. Regardless, between measurements the different branches exist in parallel. It’s what allows quantum computation to be a thing.
- Lionga 2y agoNon of that honkey ponkey is needed if you just give up locality and a hard deterministic explanation like De-Broglie-Bohm gives all the same correct measurements and conclusions like Copenhagen interpretation without multiverses and "wave function collapses". Copenhagen interpretation is just "easier" (like oops all our calculations about the univers don't seemt to fit, lets invent "dark matter") when the correct explanations makes any real world calculation practically impossible (thus ending most of physics further study) as any atom depends on every other atom at any time.
- layer8 2y agoDe Broglie–Bohm doesn’t remove anything from the wave function, and thus all the pointer states therein contained are still present. The theory basically claims that one of them is special and really exists, whereas the others only mathematically exist, but philosophically it’s not clear what the difference would be. The Broglie–Bohm ontology is bigger than MW rather than smaller.
- wasabi991011 2y ago> The Schrödinger equation inherently contains a multiverse. A simple counterexample is superdeterminism, in which the different measurement outcomes are an illusion and instead there is always a single pre-determined measurement outcome. Note that this does not violate Bell's inequality for hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics, as Bell's inequality only applies to hidden variables uncorrelated to the choice of measurement: in superdeterminism, both are predetermined so perfectly correlated.
- varjag 2y agoYes this is deeply unserious tangent in supposedly landmark technology announcement.
- athesyn 2y agoIt's just marketing.
- varjag 2y agoOh, are they selling these?
- mrguyorama 2y ago"Just marketing" in science journalism and publications is basically at the root of the anti-intellectualism movement right now (other than the standard hyper-fundamentalist Christians that need to convince people that science in general is all fraud), everyone sees all these wild claims and conclusions made by "science journalists" with zero scientific training and literal university PR departments that are trivially disproved in the layman's mind simply by the fact that they don't happen, and they lose faith not in the journalists who have no idea what they are writing about, but in science itself I used to love Popular Science magazine in middle school, but by high school I had noticed how much it's claims were hyperbole and outright nonsense. I can't fathom how or why, but most people blame the scientists for it. Puffery is not a victimless crime.
- qnleigh 2y agoThis is a viable interpretation of quantum mechanics, but currently there is no way to scientifically falsify or confirm any particular interpretation. The boundary between philosophy and science is fuzzy at times, but this question is solidly on the side of philosophy. That being said, I think the two most commonly preferred interpretations of quantum mechanics among physicists are 'Many Worlds' and 'I try not to think about it too hard.'
- m3kw9 2y agoSo are we now concerned with the environment of another universe? Like climate activitist but for multiverses?
- whoitwas 2y agoWell. If you study quantum physics and the folks who found it like Max Planck, they believed in "a conscious and intelligent non-visible living energy force .. . the matrix mind of all matter". I don't know much about multiverse, but we need something external to explain the magic we uncover. Energy and quantum mechanics are really cool but dense to get into. Like Planck, I suspect there's a link between consciousness and matter. I also think our energy doesn't cease to exist when our human carcass expires.