Computer science proof unveils unexpected form of entanglement
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
On problem 2, Chinmay underlined my use of the royal "we" and told me to report myself to the the Caltech honor code committee if I'd taken the take-home exam with anyone else. I got a good chuckle out of that one. I tanked that question—1 out of 6 points!—so I wondered whether he thought I was part of the dumbing cheating group in history.
I've heard that you can only use we if you are The Queen, an editor, or if you have a tapeworm.
https://www.scientificanimations.com/how-gut-bacteria-impact...
Sorry if I insinuated you were cheating falsely!
Reading some of these old proofs is a little cringe-inducing. Masking cluelessness with the royal we doesn't work very well :-)
I'd like to ask a question:
My view on life is that it's deterministic. The mental analogy I've come up with is this:
"If you were to roll a set of marbles down a hill, the outcome and trajectory would be identical no matter how many times you repeated the experiment given the same marble shapes and initial force."
Where the marbles here are an analogy for our genetics, and the hill + initial force our environment.
Reading the thought experiment it sounds like a similar analogy:
> "Run a bath, then dump a bunch of floating bar magnets into the water. Each magnet will flip its orientation back and forth, trying to align with its neighbors. It will push and pull on the other magnets and get pushed and pulled in return. Now try to answer this: What will be the system’s final arrangement?"
> "This problem and others like it, it turns out, are impossibly complicated."
Isn't it deterministic and calculable?
This is similar to nondeterminacy, and is why we end up with all sorts of “interpretations” (Copenhagen, …). Indeterminacy makes the math really hard. I would like to say more, but I can’t do so and be correct. If you’re really interested, pick up all three volumes of “The Theoretical Minimum”, and come to your own opinion after learning the physics.
The classical version is deterministic, but "deterministic" does not necessarily mean "calculable". There are plenty of deterministic problems that are not calculable (at least not in any reasonable time frame, where "reasonable" means "not of a much greater order of magnitude than the age of the universe") because they are so sensitive to precise conditions that miniscule differences quickly become unmanageably huge. And since we can never measure a system's state to exact precision, nor can we calculate things to exact precision, our model of a system is always imprecise, and for many systems, "imprecise" means "not calculable" even though the underlying laws are deterministic.
The quantum version is not even deterministic when measurements are involved.
> we’re just exploring one probabilistic trace through it
There is no such thing as a "probabilistic trace" through a deterministic 4-dimensional spacetime in which all events are fixed in advance.
There is no spacetime model of many worlds at all, as far as I know. Many worlds as an interpretation of QM is based on non-relativistic QM.
The "space" in which quantum states "live" is not spacetime but Hilbert space. "Many worlds" is really a misnomer in the sense that there is only one quantum state in Hilbert space. But quantum states in Hilbert space can have relationships to ordinary space that are not at all like those in classical physics: for example, a single quantum state can describe a system containing multiple entangled particles that are spatially separated; in such a state no particle by itself has any definite state at all (which is impossible in classical physics). That is true regardless of which QM interpretation you adopt.
this is also why I think that artificial consciousness (big difference to intelligence) is a whole lot harder than many people think. a stack of papers where someone has manually written the neural net (or whatever technology) computation and results is unlikely to have a subjective experience. because there is an indirection between a simulation and the real world. the simulation is a computation. the real world happens.
Even the idea that anything is being calculated is a supposition. There appear to be relationships between entities and some of them can be modelled using human math on human-accessible time scales.
But although some of the models have potentially infinite precision the universe itself clearly doesn't on any scale.
Or if it does, it's not accessible to us. So whatever is happening may use some other paradigm to manage relationships, and the entities and relationships we see are emergent and not at all fundamental.
Deterministic classical mechanics
Non deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics (most popular among physicists)
Deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics (eg Bohmian mechanics)
In the first case, the future is calculable in principle, but probably not in practise (too complex)
In both of the other two cases, it is incalculable in principle, even though the latter is deterministic
> Isn't it deterministic and calculable?
Related techniques > Particle swarm optimization:
> Particle swarm optimization is based on the ideas of animal flocking behaviour.[7] Also primarily suited for numerical optimization problems
Symbolic EA will surpass all of human physics in the next 10 years.
To complete physics, which spacetime predictions can or must have zero error?
> Maybe it's still not entirely clear, but just trust me.
I honestly can't tell if your comment is satire. If it is, it is pretty good.
If you have a better idea that fits all the observations, publish and you'll get a Nobel.