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shoyer

I wrote Scott Aaronson about this and he showed me where he already addressed this on his blog:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-269770

Note the response from one of the authors of this paper:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-270906

And Scott's response to that:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2053#comment-271488

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Thanks for linking to this, Aaronson brings some good critiques (as did others on this thread). I do however think it is a bit disrespectful to the authors to use the word debunk,. Debunk implies a myth or a belief, or a completely unsupported theory, such as creationism. In contradistinction, this is peer reviewed science, and while there are undoubtedly probably faulty assumptions behind their work (or merely overstated significance), there may be some underlying validity and modest importance within the field of unconventional computing as well, so let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Also, just curious as a parallel example, Tononi and co had their day in the sun on Aaronson's blog a few months back, and there was a vigorous back and forth including a great response from Tononi ; would you say that now IIT has been 'debunked'? If so, how do you justify that? If not, why not wait for the authors of UMM theory and its hardware extension to have a chance to reply? This is how progress is made in science, deliberation & iteration, not instant victories.

"Debunk" was my word, not Scott's, and you're right, it's overly harsh. I've edited my post.

But Scott did convince me, at least, that this paper is nowhere near as relevant or important as the authors make it out to me.

This is not peer-reviewed science yet, it's a preprint on Arxiv. Anyone (more or less) can upload anything to Arxiv.

The paper is submitted but not accepted (passed review yet), in this you're right, but I think its a growing practice for reputable scientists (as well as nobodies) to post to Arxiv immediately after they've submitted to a 'top' journal.

Anyways, here's the lead authors page, for the curious: http://physics.ucsd.edu/~diventra/

I accept that Arxiv material is generally eventually published, and serves as a staging post for publishable material, however I was protesting to the idea that being on Arxiv in any way constitutes peer review.

I note that the lead author is a Physicist, which makes it even more suspect for me - Physics and Theoretical Computer Science share some of the same toolkit, but the tricks and corner cases in each case can be wildly different, meaning that even if someone is a world leader in one field, they can be a complete novice in another!

This essay by Scott Aaronson is an interesting study of various ways to solve NP complete problems in real physics: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf

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"Well respected experts" can also say BS, especially for new approaches they don't like and/or understand.

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