Strilanc

19 ms·

301.
by Strilanc 5y ago
It assumes life is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, which it is. Avoiding heat death requires a renewable source of negentropy, to bypass the second law. Some sort of perpetual motion machine that you can pump energy out of. E.g
302.
by Strilanc 5y ago
I remember showing a coworker a complexity analysis I did, where I'd written "0.002 n lg n + 3n". I was surprised when they asked "why did you put the insignificant one first?" but then realized... that's exact
303.
by Strilanc 5y ago
Why would gravity follow an inverse square law in this model? Wouldn't you expect there to be a hard cutoff as you moved away from a busy region, instead of a gradual decrease?
304.
by Strilanc 5y ago
It depends how much circuit optimization you consider to be cheating. The hard part of Shor's algorithm is computing `pow(g, e, modulus=N)` where g is a uniformly random number, e is a uniformly superposed number, and N is the number y
305.
by Strilanc 5y ago
A physical Z applies a microwave pulse to the qubit. A virtual Z is a book-keeping trick that changes the rotation axis of later gates. When you're writing an algorithm, you tend to want as few operations as possible so you'd pref
306.
by Strilanc 5y ago
This was a really interesting project. 1. The community solved it really fast, within a day or three, but a single programmer solved it even faster [1]. You could also argue that it was the month or so [2] making the website that led to t
307.
by Strilanc 5y ago
In this case the theory doesn't have well-defined implications. The different interpretations of quantum mechanics, which agree on the observable details, disagree on the unobservable details. It's like an entity within a game of
308.
by Strilanc 5y ago
Videos are also better at transfering tacit knowledge. Stuff like little habits and workarounds people have that are important but which they don't realize need to be communicated. For example, creating a virtual environment for a pyth
309.
by Strilanc 5y ago
The demon is introduced as a magical effect, but the obvious followup question is why can't you actually implement it. Why can't you make a machine that lowers entropy by opening and closing a door to let atoms go one way but not
310.
by Strilanc 5y ago
I mean n qubits that are interpreted as a little endian 2s complement integer. Here's a coined walk circuit: https://algassert.com/quirk#circuit=%7B%22cols%22%3A%5B%5B%2... Here's an uncoined walk circuit: https:
311.
by Strilanc 5y ago
In a coined walk you apply a hadamard to the least significant qubit of an integer register, then increment the register, hadamard the least significant qubit, decrement the register, and repeat. Although there is no additional degree of fr
312.
by Strilanc 5y ago
Sorry, I misread your comment initially. Yes, if you have an additional degree of freedom that is not being plotted (a coined walk), then the overlap is fine.
313.
by Strilanc 5y ago
In a quantum walk the locations typically correspond to states, not to qubits. You're right that turning them into qubits would allow the diagram to work, but then I don't think it would match up with the "vampire fangs"
314.
by Strilanc 5y ago
Yeah, the descending arrows diagram they show in the post can't be correct because there are cases where two outputs overlap at only one spot. That makes it impossible for them to be orthogonal which breaks reversibility.
315.
by Strilanc 5y ago
Oh no I love sci-hub but I second-guess linking it. Thanks for the mirror! So, reading the paper proper, I was wrong about it being the authors' talks. They picked existing engineering talks and interviews. It'd be nice to be able
316.
by Strilanc 5y ago
I looked at the paper's abstract [1], and this is a conclusion made from just two talks/interviews by the authors of the study? Should probably replicate it before telling millions of people to buy hundreds of dollars of audio equ
317.
by Strilanc 5y ago
How does the cloud of debris stick around? For context, I've played Kerbal so I know a bit about orbits but not much. My intuition is that the velocities involved in being in orbit in the first place are so big (7 kilometers per second
318.
by Strilanc 5y ago
Errors experienced by quantum computers can be decomposed into two types of errors: X type (bit flips) and Z type (phase flips). Classical computers only have bit flips. The surface code is a quantum error correcting code built out of a che
319.
by Strilanc 5y ago
I think VR headsets are within a factor of 10 of the cost of a good monitor, and within a factor of 5 of the angular resolution of 20:20 vision. It seems very plausible to me as the resolution goes up and costs come down that e.g. a company
320.
by Strilanc 6y ago
It's space time curvature. This is an important distinction, because although you can zero out the spatial component of your 4-vector you can't also zero out the time component. Apparently you can think of the gravitational force
321.
by Strilanc 6y ago
The amount of precision actually required would depend on the size of the problem being solved. But I meant that the mathematical model you had in mind probably just used perfect real numbers without a notion of precision.
322.
by Strilanc 6y ago
Are you sure? I was just going off a quick search of Amazon, where 1 GB of ram cost ~30$, 1 TB of disk cost ~50$, and a CPU with ~1MB of L2 cache cost ~200$. Based on that I actually thought 100x was a comfortable underestimate, not an over
323.
by Strilanc 6y ago
It really doesn't. Sure the mathematical model you have of a prism might contain terms that the solution is encoded into, but these terms either a) require rapidly increasing effort to extract from the experiment as the computational p
324.
by Strilanc 6y ago
It's an interesting question whether, over the long term, quantum hardware will match the feature of classical hardware where memory is significantly cheaper than compute-capable bits in the CPU. Hard drives are 100x cheaper per bit th
325.
by Strilanc 6y ago
I really dislike the way the data is being summarized as "100% avoided or mitigated*". First, they're omitting the types of case they're failing to mitigate (rear endings in this case). Cue "60% of the time it works
326.
by Strilanc 6y ago
> I think that qm summarized in one sentence is the no-cloning theorem The no-cloning theorem isn't unique to quantum mechanics. As with many quantum paradoxes, you can translate it into an equivalent statistical paradox. The classi
327.
by Strilanc 6y ago
Quantum mechanics puts even more constraints on unknown degrees of freedom, because information leakage into ancillary systems has observable effects on interference patterns.
328.
by Strilanc 6y ago
I used to say this. My experience of substitute meat was basically "What the, why does this cafeteria burger taste like garbage? Dammit, I grabbed the fake tofu one by accident.". The key recent difference, for me, is that this ex
329.
by Strilanc 6y ago
Have you watched demoscene videos? I think you're overestimating how much information is needed.
330.
by Strilanc 6y ago
The xor, sum pair can't distinguish missing 11, 0 from missing 10, 1.

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