ScottAaronson

14 ms·

1. 61.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Dude, if you'd just asked me a more specific question, you could surely have baited me into commenting on this or that culture war issue. Since you asked a general question, though, I'll simply answer with the generality that I w
2. 62.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Yes, there's some great stuff going on at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics outside Munich. Also the groups in Innsbruck and Vienna in Austria.
3. 63.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   There are really two questions here. The first one is, can the human brain be simulated by a Turing machine in its input-output behavior (to a suitable precision, given appropriate initial data, yada yada)? Note that, even though you spe
4. 64.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Sure, you could shake off the idea (if you haven't already...) that quantum entanglement means communication faster than light. This is, interestingly, exactly the same kind of error as the one that says that a quantum computer is jus
5. 65.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   The difference between QC and all those other examples of interference is that, in the case of QC, the interference happens in configuration space rather than ordinary 3-dimensional space. And configuration space is enormous ; it has a
6. 66.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   No, I think this is more a question for physics than for complexity theory -- complexity theory basically just takes the computational model and the resources you care about as inputs, then uses math to study how much of the resources are i
7. 67.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Yes, that's PRECISELY what I meant.
8. 68.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   No, they're called qubits. It's literally a quantum-mechanical bit, in the sense that it's a superposition of the |0> and |1> states---i.e., a quantum state that returns a bit when you make a complete measurement on it
9. 69.▲
   by ScottAaronson 8y ago

   Every few months there's another paper on the arXiv trying to do exactly that. Pretty much without exception, I've found the papers to be terrible -- leaping immediately to QM without first considering more prosaic stories for wh
10. 70.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    I don't begrudge others their sincerely held faiths! But I confess that I haven't yet seen the need for nonstandard logics for anything I've personally been interested in.
11. 71.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Which topics?
12. 72.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    You should probably wait for an AMA with someone who's actually an expert in AI, and ask them this question. Since you asked me, though, I did a quick Google search and found the following paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf
13. 73.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    It's not obvious why you'd want to talk about complex amplitudes, whose squared absolute values are probabilities, outside the context of quantum mechanics. Maybe a better way to say it is: once you're talking about such amp
14. 74.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Yes, I do think there's a significant chance of that. If it happens, my main interest would be to understand WHY. What are the non-obvious limitations that you mention? What is true about the world that makes it seem to have this
15. 75.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Yup. :-) Or better yet, we could bifurcate into: (1) Why is our universe apparently unable to solve the halting problem for Turing machines ? The answer, presumably, is a combination of the physical Church-Turing Thesis (specifically, the
16. 76.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    I think it's too early in the field, and there's too much basic research still to be done, to talk usefully about a "Moore's Law." For godsakes, we're not even sure yet whether superconducting qubits or trappe
17. 77.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    A quantum computer is a device that exploits constructive and destructive interference among exponentially many amplitudes , which are numbers that are closely related to probabilities but can be positive, negative, or even complex. If you
18. 78.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Uhh, most people don't even try to succeed in academia! So no surprise if they don't. It's not like I made it to the NBA or something. :-) Let me speak only about academic CS, since that's what I know best. Of the s
19. 79.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    No, I don't think that QCs will help much for simulating chaotic systems, except insofar as those systems are also quantum-mechanical. For (e.g.) predicting the weather, there may be small quantum speedups that you can get here and th
20. 80.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    It feels really uncomfortable that, if you have infinitely many people wearing red or blue hats that they can't see, then they can all guess their own hat color with only finitely many of them being wrong. Not to mention Banach-Tarski
21. 81.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    A classic from 1994 is "Computational Complexity" by Papadimitriou. Two good sources for newer material (from the past quarter-century) are "Complexity Theory: A Modern Approach" by Arora and Barak, and "The Nature
22. 82.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    My position on the technical fundamentals never changed much: namely, D-Wave is building devices that could be interesting from various engineering perspectives, but that as far as most of us can tell, are not getting speedups over existing
23. 83.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    I already answered that in another comment, but briefly: Waterloo/Perimeter, Caltech, MIT, Berkeley, U. Maryland, Singapore, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, CWI Amsterdam, Hebrew University, Tsinghua, UTS Sydney, McGill/Montreal, LRI
24. 84.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Sorry, I don't know who that is.
25. 85.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    I'm like the worst person on earth to be giving anyone else advice about that!! Do you have any idea how much time I waste obsessively reading the news, or worrying about people saying mean things about me on social media, rather th
26. 86.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    No, I hadn't heard of it before your comment! Please no one tell the physicist David Mermin about this, or he'll picket the group with his long-running campaign to change the spelling of qubit to "Qbit." :-)
27. 87.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    I had close colleagues at LANL, but many of them (Leonid Gurvits, Howard Barnum, Manny Knill) have since left. I'll probably visit Argonne and Sandia sometime in the next few years to give talks, and to learn about what they're d
28. 88.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Thanks!!!
29. 89.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    That depends on you and your interests! From the very beginning and up through the present, the majority of people in quantum computing have goten there via physics. But my own background is in theoretical computer science---I've onl
30. 90.▲
    by ScottAaronson 8y ago

    Sorry, I don't know what "emergence" means in this context. If you mean AGI, I think (hope?) that we're still quite some ways away from it. Yes, quantum computing could help with AI -- for example through Grover's