ScottAaronson

9 ms·

1. 31.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Thanks! Given your particular situation, it sounds to me like you should not only buy QCSD, but buy 200 copies of it to give all your friends and family. :-) More seriously, the overlap between QCSD and WPSCACC is actually relatively small-
2. 32.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Relax, my friend. If you accept the Many-Worlds Interpretation at all, then you're constantly splitting into parallel copies, millions of times per second, with every little decoherence event that takes place in your brain. Whether
3. 33.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Yes, I'm (not surprisingly :-) ) a fan of increasing federal funding for academic research. Equally important, enough of the funding needs to be in unrestricted, competitively awarded grants for basic science, rather than tied up in h
4. 34.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Yup
5. 35.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Thanks!!!
6. 36.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   If I knew the answer, I couldn't tell you. :-) More seriously: people have mooted this possibility for as long as I've been in this field (~20 years). But keep in mind that, when Cocks and Williamson at GCHQ discovered what would
7. 37.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   1. Quantum computing is the most powerful model of computation we have based on currently known physics ---in the sense that anything more powerful would need to be based on new physics. From the standpoint of theoretical computer science
8. 38.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Aha, thanks for that extremely useful clarification! I was also confused from the abstract and intro about exactly what the inputs and outputs were. Yes, the clear impression was created that they learned the rules---in the sense that the
9. 39.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   I'm not an expert on this, but I think the surface code is so popular because it's 2-dimensionally local and has great parameters and speed of error correction. But people certainly work on other codes too, and if someone invents
10. 40.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Yup.
11. 41.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    When I'm not flipping qubits around, I eat, sleep, blog, answer emails, play with my two kids, get depressed reading the news about US politics, and then get even more depressed reading people saying mean things about me and my nerdy f
12. 42.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Thanks!! I imagine that programming QCs will be a lot like programming classical computers, except with an additional body of technical knowledge that one needs to master. In that respect, it will be a lot like 3D graphics programming, o
13. 43.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    I'm constantly learning new things that to people from other fields would be freshman-level trivialities! The most recent such example would need to be something I learned today. For example, maybe a little tidbit that I picked up
14. 44.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    +1 There's no clear relationship between P vs. NP and the Riemann hypothesis, except that the generalized Riemann hypothesis (GRH) would let you derandomize certain randomized algorithms, and also Mulmuley's Geometric Complexity T
15. 45.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    No, almost certainly not in the coming decade. See my answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17429547
16. 46.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    See this recent survey article: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10377 Briefly, a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer could give a square-root speedup for Bitcoin's proof-of-work, and could completely break its ellipt
17. 47.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Qubits lose their quantum superposition states as they interact with their environment---effectively getting "measured" by their surroundings. This is called decoherence , and is the central engineering obstacle to building usef
18. 48.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    " cue -bit." I.e., the name of the letter Q, followed by "bit."
19. 49.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Yes, you can define a universal quantum Turing machine, which is a single quantum Turing machine U able to simulate any other quantum Turing machine M (at least, to arbitrary precision) given a coded description of M on its tape. This is o
20. 50.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Thanks; that made my day!!!
21. 51.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Yes, a fundamental property of quantum information undergoing unitary evolution (meaning, no measurements, no discarding stuff into the environment, etc.) is that it can be neither created nor destroyed. This fact enters into my work, or
22. 52.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    That's a tough one! So far, I've only seen ONE game meant to teach quantum mechanics that I thought actually worked, in terms of being (1) actually about QM rather than some vague analogy, and (2) fun to play. It's this one
23. 53.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    It has multiple PR problems, including the one you mentioned. :-) Everyone who follows QC knows that simulating quantum chemistry could be commercially important, while breaking RSA is not. And as far as I can tell, no one cares anymore ab
24. 54.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Yes, when you look at the history of AI, a "quantum winter" is an obvious worry---i.e., a situation where the hype about QC becomes so unmoored from the reality as finally to cause the popular narrative to switch its polarity.
25. 55.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Here's a modern viewpoint: there are many different things we can mean in saying that one model of computation (e.g., quantum) has abilities that exceed another model's (e.g., the polynomial hierarchy). So, we could be talking
26. 56.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    See this previous answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17429093 Sure, inborn talent matters. Hard work matters. And what about the less-appreciated converses of those two qualities: namely, acquired talent and inb
27. 57.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    See this previous answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17428675
28. 58.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    I admire your determination to start a scientific career at age sixty! I once faced the "converse" problem---how to start doing research at age 14 or 15, before I'd found any mentor to help me---and it was one of the great r
29. 59.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    1) Yes, a unitary transformation like the Hadamard gate maps the state |0> to |0>+|1>, while mapping |1> to |0>-|1>. In either case, if you then just measured immediately in the {|0>,|1>} basis without doing anythin
30. 60.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    1. The P vs. NP survey is only 2 years old, so all the edits I'd make to it now would be rather minor ones: for example, including some more recent circuit lower bounds of Ryan Williams and others, some more no-go results for Geometric