da-bacon

They moved the goal posts to misrepresent Grover speedup. Taking an oracular result and opening the box, in almost all cases, changes the query complexity speed up. Yes we've known that since, well since people thought about oracular speedups. Periodically someone notices this, writes up a paper pointing it out, and then promptly is forgotten about because it misses the point.

Further they completely ignore that when you open up the oracle like they have done, the problem they are considering is really CIRCUIT-SAT, and in this case the grover algorithm yields a 2^{n/2} algorithm whereas the best classical algorithm is 2^n. That the classical algorithm cannot do better that 2^n is the "exponential time hypothesis". I don't think the authors want to claim that they have disproven this hypothesis, since they didn't really. They just showed in some cases, in CIRCUIT-SAT, the problem is easy. This is a fairly benign, "yes...and....", statement.

So I think this is word games where the game the authors has played is to chose the worst words to describe their result. It's a bit sad because the authors are trying to think about the role of entanglement in these algorithms, and where entanglement is low we know that we can efficiently simulate classically these quantum systems.

Google stopped using email for ad targeting https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15862492/google-gmail-adv...

I integrated a registrar with many registries a few years ago. It amused me greatly that .io had by far the clunkiest api of all the many registries…with quite a few special cases against the standard. They’ve since been bought so they likely have a better api, but it always amused me that the “hacker” cred types would choose the registry with the wonkiest api.

-_

The k dimensional Weisfieler-Leman algorithm https://www.iti.zcu.cz/wl2018/wlpaper.html

Connect a huge number of graph isomorphism algorithms with a algebra.

Music for the thousanders from Anathem.

Yep! This was PR for IonQ SPACing so totally focused on running via their API or APIs they integrate with (Azure, AWS)

Well you also want to run the program and process the data, so for that later step it’s nice to stay in one language that has support for the data analysis.

IBM has a nice online resource for learning quantum computing using their framework (Qiskit) https://qiskit.org/textbook/preface.html

Lot's of reasons for this. Mostly having to do with the minimal size and sophistication of current quantum programs, and the background that many of these efforts arose from Physics teams where python is heavily used. One of the most popular non-Python based version of these sorts of frameworks is https://yaoquantum.org/ which is in Julia.

Write a Jaqal IonQ API interface, and I'm sure they will add it (I no longer work for said company)

Oh this looks familiar! I left off my favorite https://github.com/dabacon/qsel (have never used this to run against a real device).

Funny to see this here. I created scirate years ago when I was in academia working in quantum computing. Back when Digg was hot. When I left that world and joined Google, I shut it down as I needed to spend all my time learning to code (true today as well I suppose). It was then rewritten by others. Twice! And relaunched using the old domain name. Many thanks to the current stewards.

Amusingly it was even more useful to me after I left academia. Scirate’s community is almost entirely theoretical quantum computing, and so I was able to keep up with the field by looking every three months or so at the top papers.

As noted in other comments, the end point of vanity voting isn't great. It's not great at discovery, but I have found papers there I would never have read. But because it is a small community it actually does a good job in quantifying what the community feels is important. I suspect if scirate was ever more widely used it would be less useful.

Another interesting phenomenon is that no one ever precisely defined what voting meant. Some people think of it as endorsing. Others as bookmarking. Not sure what impact this has, but sometimes if you score your own paper people will growl at you.

I used to work for a registrar and had the job of connecting up to the registries, who are the entities that ultimately allocate the domain names. (Yeah great naming choice, no chance of those words being confused with each other.) Registrars talk to registries via EPP, an xml based specification. While there is a spec, the registries variously mess it up in odd and interesting ways, all of which I got to discover as we did these integrations. .io was by far the worst. I remember that you could renew domain names in units of either 1, 2, or 5 years. It was like a developer had done the dynamic programming problem with coins and decided that they would put that in their api.

Considering that .io seems to have been adopted as a signal of "geeky tech cred", I always laugh, and think really it stands for .ironic.

Those are mostly doctors. Any school with a decent med school will have top earners like this.

If only. Dirac and Wiener did not understand the significance of the action appearing where it did. Feynman gave it meaning. An analogy for what you are saying is that Einstein just rederived Lorentz’s equations. That’s one of the most interesting characteristics of physics, it’s not just math and computation, meaning is hugely significant.

I’d also say the path integral is not what he is most known for among practicing physicists, but that’s another story (I recommend “QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga@).

I'd say start with the quantum computing specific stuff and then add the physics. It will make some of the quantum physics stuff easier, I think.

I currently work on the software that runs Google's quantum computers. To paraphrase the Talking Heads: How did I get there?

PhD 2001 in physics, working on quantum computation. Postdocs at Caltech and Santa Fe Institute, then landed a research faculty position at the University of Washington. Yeah, raise your own funds! Jumped ship in 2011 (burnout, quality of life, university not caring about quantum computing) and went off to become a "real" software engineer at Google. Worked on ads (as one does), then helped build Google Domains, then worked on distributed privacy preserving machine learning. About two years ago, my background in quantum computing caught back up to me, and now I run the team that builds software for Google's quantum computers.

People ask how to get into quantum computing if you are a software engineer. I will say that you really need to spend some deep time in quantum computing, either a masters or a PhD or some very very serious self study. There are certainly parts of writing software for quantum computing that don't require that, but if you really want an expansive career working in quantum computers you'll want to have a deep background.

Happy to answer any questions (I worked on Cirq).

There are already lots of great open source frameworks and languages (qiskit, pyquil, q#, among many others). A few things we've tried to do which we think are important for near term algorithms: * Data structures (Circuit, Moment, Operation) with nice control on building and optimizing circuits. Supports device specific constraints. * Qubits tied to a variety of spatial layouts. * Timing control through the Schedule data structure. * Runtime values supplied to circuits parameterized by symbols. One of the few classical operations supported by current hardware.

Per alumni, it has the same rate of Nobel prize winners as MIT https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-st...

Does the recent result on BQP not being in PH relative to an oracle do anything to your priors about the power of quantum computers relative to classical computers? If you had to distill why that oracle separation works, what would you say is the main trick from the perspective of "where does the power of quantum computers come from"?

I think to say this is a "liberal" problem is to miss the fact that more than a majority of independents, and nearly a majority of Republicans oppose nuclear energy http://news.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppos... To put those numbers in context, it is important to contrast it with support for the competitors, solar and wind (http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-climat... but it doesn't break it down by party affiliation), which have 80%+ support.

That class was so many careers ago. Glad you enjoyed the notes. I wonder if I taught it today: maybe I'd start by having students use a simulator, or maybe trying to write a simple simulator themselves!

Cool! My April fools day joke this year was a quantum programming language made up entirely of "entanglement" and "superposition": https://github.com/dabacon/qsel The simulator takes about 150 lines of python as well.

"Quantum advantage with shallow circuits" by Bravyi, Gosset, and Koenig https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00690

What's beautiful about this paper is that it shows a provable separation in the power of quantum circuits over classical circuits. That is in contrast to many cases where quantum advantage is only suspected (the most notorious being Shor's algorithm: Factoring could be in P).

Another cool thing is that this separation is fundamentally connected to quantum entanglement and the challenge of simulating measurements on multipartite quantum states with shared randomness and classical communication. This gives me some hope that this points to a path for future deep insights separating quantum from classical computing.

When I found a version of this paper, as an undergrad researcher circa 1995, it changed the course of my life and I spent an amazing decade working in quantum computing.

For those who are interested, the result quoted by Wheeler, which attempts to derive quantum theory via arguments using distinguishability, appears in Wootters' Ph.D. thesis in 1980. 33 years later(!), he wrote a follow up https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2018 in which he showed that result essentially only works for the real number version of quantum theory. (Pessimist would say this means it is a dead end, optimist that we are just missing something!)

You can find a bunch of n-body solutions, some of which like those in this article are pretty amazing, on Cris Moore's gallery page http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~moore/gallery.html

Does not pass the Tulip test:

Also keep in mind the growth of Tulips as a whole. New wealth is being created and reinvested.

For example, I participated in a tulip offering 18 months ago which has produced a sizable value. I then took 20% of the gain and spread it across new tulip offerings.

At scale, think of everyone whom invested in Carolus Clusius early and Bizarden just after Ogier de Busbecq sent the first seeds. Their gains are used to reinvest into the tulip ecosystem at the earliest stages, thus, keeping their fortunes regenerating and growing.

Very excited to see this because it is a big step in a community (quantum computing/info) taking control back of the peer review process from for-profit (and to a smaller degree non-profit society-based) journals. The challenge will be in how the larger cs/physics community sees it, but I don't think you can figure that out without trying.

Murray Gell-Mann has some not so positive views about Feynman https://youtu.be/rnMsgxIIQEE