da-bacon

Looks like a variant of Kuoerberg sieving and not that complicated so I’d expect we will know whether it is correct or not soon.

“The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell is full of illustrations like the ones show in the article and really gave me a sense of what k might imagine when reading about the cell.

“Cell Biology by the Numbers” by Ron Milo and Rob Philips is full of order of magnitude calculations of about the processes of the cell. How fast are they, over what distance, how much, etc.

“Gil Kalai #23: So we’re perfectly clear, from my perspective your position has become like that of Saddam Hussein’s information minister, who repeatedly went on TV to explain how Iraq was winning the war even as American tanks rolled into Baghdad. I.e., you are writing to us from an increasingly remote parallel universe. The smooth exponential falloff of circuit fidelity with the number of gates has by now been seen in separate experiments from Google, IBM, Quantinuum, QuEra, USTC, and probably others I’m forgetting right now. Yes, IBM’s gate fidelity is a little lower than Google’s, but the exponential falloff pattern is the same. And, far from being “statistically unreasonable,” this exponential falloff is precisely what the simplest model of the situation (i.e., independent depolarizing noise on each qubit) would predict. You didn’t predict it, because you started from the axiom that quantum error-correction had to fail somehow—but the rest of us, who didn’t start from that axiom, did predict it!”

Ouch.

Not sure why you would say that? This sort of exponential suppression of errors is exactly how quantum error correction works and why we think quantum computing is viable. Source: have worked on quantum error correction for a couple of decades. Disclosure: I work on the team that did this experiment. More reading: lecture notes from back in the day explaining this exponential suppression https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse599d/06wi/lectu...

Wait this is a different John Bell (https://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/) than the Bell Inequalities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell). But strangely that John Bell has also worked on quantum foundations (looks like quantum logic and contextuality).

https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_st...

A sad day for computing, and a sad day for Seattle.

An analogy would be something like this. Factoring is hard. We base RSA on the hardness of this problem and there we use numbers that are the product of two primes. Someone just found an algorithm that doesn’t work to find the product of two primes, but can take a product of four primes and return two products of two primes. Do you feel safe with RSA?

Anyway the paper could be wrong or it could be right, it will take a while for those in the field to dig through this. As a cautionary tale, there have been a few extra good quantum people who have proposed quantum attacks on lattice problems that have later been shown to have bugs.

The students were not happy. This was great lawn to just lay out, play frisbee, etc. A few days after this blew up in the student news, a large wall showed up right in front of the main coffee shop, the Red Door. That was a nice space with beautiful trees and tables (ah, the Southern California weather). The wall was right in the middle of this and blocked off the thoroughfare. The wall was called “Eigenvectors” and that word was painted on it, along with a ton of other linear algebra formulas. I remember walking by and going “holy shit is that the Moore-Penrose inverse?!” In the end the students won, the sculpture was never built.

But also yeah totally agree on the “fuck yeah science!!!” Personally that also scares the crap out of me, but maybe that is a bit too much heresy in tech land.

For those who are interested, here is the article https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

As you say, Cormac's relationship with science is a bit hard to get from his novels. But I also think he really did love science, you might enjoy one of the most memorable days during the short time I was at the Santa Fe Institute https://dabacon.org/babel/2023/06/13/cormac/

One of the first example is the experiment of Egan et al where they demonstrated a fault-tolerant QEC measurement using 13 physical qubits. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11482 They show improvements in the logical performance on the codes, but it is still a pretty small improvement (factor of 2).

Another example is the experiment we performed at Google https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.06431 where we used superconducting qubits. In that experiment we showed that we were able to go from a small code to a slightly larger code and that the error got "slightly better" as you scaled things up.

Other groups have also demo-ed small scale logical qubits. Notable ones include those done by Quantinuum (trapped ion qubits) and ETH Zurich (superconducting qubits). But all of these show very small improvements in error rates. To truly build "logical" qubits one would hope to get suppression of errors by factors of like 100-1000, and no one is really close to that right now.

Amusingly Einstein both identified gravitational waves in his then new general relativity and then changed his mind about whether they existed. Indeed he had found three different types of these waves, and two of them were simply coordinate artifacts (they could be made to travel at any speed, Eddington famously quiped that they could be made to move at the "speed of thought"). The third type however didn't have this problem (though again here Einstein would write a paper where he claimed these gravitation waves required singularities, but these turned out these were all coordinates singularities .... sort of like how late and long coordinates misbehave at the poles)

In some ways the physics of it is straightforward, in other ways....not so much.