Strilanc

13 ms·

31.
by Strilanc 9mo ago
It's fame comes from the simplicity of its construction rather than its utility elsewhere in mathematics. For example, Graham's number is pretty famous but it's more of a historical artifact rather than a foundational buildin
32.
by Strilanc 9mo ago
Yes, speed matters. No, quantum computers can't do everything instantly even with unbounded qubits. A well studied example is that it's impossible to parallelize the steps in Grover's algorithm. To find a preimage amongst N p
33.
by Strilanc 9mo ago
Author here: yes that's all correct. This is perhaps not clear enough, but the title refers to a pattern . For classical bits on a quantum computer this pattern is already playing out (as shown in the cited experiments), and for quant
34.
by Strilanc 10mo ago
Factoring will be okay for tracking progress later; it's just a bad benchmark now . Factoring benchmarks have little visibility into fault tolerance spinning up, which is the important progress right now. Factoring becoming a reasonab
35.
by Strilanc 10mo ago
This is a type that I would use a lot. For example, I often write classes that do cacheable analysis that results in a dict (e.g. the class stores a list of tiles defined by points and users want a point-to-tiles mapping for convenience). I
36.
by Strilanc 11mo ago
Well, for example, consider this recent study that claimed developers using AI tools take 19% longer to finish tasks [1]. This was their methodology: > we recruited 16 experienced developers from large open-source repositories (averagin
37.
by Strilanc 11mo ago
> The precision in phase needed to perform an accurate QFT scales EXPONENTIALLY with the number of qubits you're trying to transform. This is false. The gates that appear in the textbook QFT circuit (such as the one shown on wikiped
38.
by Strilanc 11mo ago
I saw a commercial once where the joke was a guy asking a girl for her IP address instead of her phone number. They went with 127.0.0.1; the loopback address. So (at least in my eyes) there was the extra unspoken joke of her essentially tel
39.
by Strilanc 1y ago
> the people writing the standard are not exactly known for adding features “just because” Ah yes, C++, the discerning language. Iterating over optional does seem syntactically convenient. My main question would be if it guarantees n
40.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Every one of these "performance tricks" is describing how to convince rust's borrow checker that you're allowed to do a thing. It's more like "performance permission slips".
41.
by Strilanc 1y ago
No, the pre-shared states are never consumed. They are catalysts, not fuel.
42.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Yes, the post is focusing on the overall effect of operations (unitaries) rather than their continuous trajectories (hamiltonians acting on system via Schrodinger equation) (analogous to working with impulses rather than forces). To make th
43.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Realistic Shor circuits have depth polynomial in n, but you can easily construct ones whose depth is polylogarithmic in n. Just do the multiplications as a binary tree instead of in a linear order, using log depth multiplication circuits, a
44.
by Strilanc 1y ago
In most quantum computer designs, gates are signals generated on demand at runtime rather than material deposited at fabrication time. In this regime, the concept of an ALU makes no sense. Instead of just sending pulses doing the exact gate
45.
by Strilanc 1y ago
A gate isn't a qubit, it's an operation applied to qubits. You can do more than one operation per qubit.
46.
by Strilanc 1y ago
The more plausible amount of optimization is less optimization. Or, more accurately, the benefits of optimization at large sizes is expected to be less beneficial than it was for the N=21 circuit.
47.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Estimates of the cost of RSA1024 use explicit circuit constructions at the target size, rather than extrapolating from the 4 bit case. So they implicitly account for the discontinuity being pointed out in the post. So this post has no impac
48.
by Strilanc 1y ago
> So how many gates are we talking to factor some "cryptographically useful" number? Table 5 of [1] estimates 7 billion Toffoli gates to factor 2048 bit RSA integers. > Is there some pathway that makes quantum computers u
49.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Quantum mechanics actually contains measurable real numbers (well.. complex numbers). Amplitudes are postulated to be infinitely precise, and rounding them has a tendency to introduce pretty serious consequences like FTL communication. For
50.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Oh damn, in this year's sigbovik, Tom7 was trying to find out if shapes were Rupert or not: https://sigbovik.org/2025/proceedings.pdf#page=346
51.
by Strilanc 1y ago
That paper is hilarious, and is correct that there's plenty of shit to make fun of... but there's also progress. I recommend watching Sam Jacques' talk from PQCrypto 2025 [0]. It would be silly to delay PQC adoption because
52.
by Strilanc 1y ago
It's classical ray optics that fails in the path-not-longer-than-wavelength regime. Classical wave optics works in that regime. Where classical techniques fail is at low brightness (because you start resolving individual photons).
53.
by Strilanc 1y ago
I think you're confusing the distinction between classical ray optics and classical wave optics with the distinction between classical wave optics and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics and classical wave optics agree on the explanat
54.
by Strilanc 1y ago
The standard explanation for light "knowing" the angle of diffraction is that actually light just propagates in every direction and then constructive interference is stronger for paths near the shortest path because its length is
55.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Yeah this post nails the issue. In order to do the X-basis measurement described in the paper, it's necessary to do very funky things to the simulated agents inside the computers. Probably the easiest way to implement the measurement w
56.
by Strilanc 1y ago
> we caveat the speedup result we find by noting that [...] the oracle we construct in this work can be efficiently simulated by a classical computer. T_T You could replace the quantum chip with a classical signal processor decoding th
57.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Isn't that incompatible with the models being consistent? Suppose model A proves BB(748) = X and model B proves BB(748) = Y > X. But presumably the models can interpret running all size 748 Turing machines for Y steps. Either one o
58.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Ah yes, another entry in the "I'll compute Fibonacci fast!... oh no" genre. My favorite of the genre so far is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzT9I1d-LlQ , which tries to compute a big Fibonacci number in un
59.
by Strilanc 1y ago
Yeah, I measure ~250 nanoseconds on CPU single shot. ~125 nanos amortized if repeated 100 times. It's fast enough that I'm not sure I'm benchmarking the method, as opposed to overheads like reading the time. #include &l
60.
by Strilanc 1y ago
It could still be a pseudo random number generator behind the scenes. For example, a typical quantum circuit simulator would implement measurements by computing a probability then asking a pseudo random number generator for the outcome and

More ›