http://dabacon.org/
- da-bacon parentAgree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is similar in that foundations of math makes an appearance. The other is “The Weyl Conjectures” by Karen Olson, which captures what it’s like to really do mathematics. Highly recommend both.
- For 2, I don’t think you can break ties however you like because this would give you random left or right associativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_associativity For example 2-4-7 would be either (2-4)-7 or 2-(4-7), depending on how you broke the tie.
- When I was a high school student, I read “Artificial Life” by Stephen Levy and got really into alife. The book had snapshots of a daughter of Codd’s CA, Langston’s loops, on its book sleeve. I was able to back up some of the rules and then deduce what the others were to repro this CA. I still chase that feeling I got from doing this.
- https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8525#comment-1997424
“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.
- >That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the experience of pretty much all other research and development in quantum error correction over the course of the history of quantum computing.
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...
- Yeah me too. I wrote a post about why it hurt so much to lose this place along similar lines https://dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/08/16/requiem-for-the-livin...
- Edited
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).
- I'm reminded of what Neal himself said when asked about building the primer: "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them"
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_st...
- There was a world before the dot com explosion when tinkering with computers was odd, a passion that gripped few, and was looked upon as extremely odd by most. This museum was the closest thing to being able to travel back to that era. You could plop yourself down at a Xerox Alto and hack away to your heart's content. Being able to share this experience with my son is something I will always remember about this museum.
A sad day for computing, and a sad day for Seattle.
- Please be gentle on my poor digital ocean droplet :) Note that these notes were not published and were probably something he typed up while thinking about the subject. If you haven’t, I highly recommend checking out one of his “it from bit” papers, they are actually kind of wild https://philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ.pdf
- These are notes he typed up, maybe for himself and maybe to share with others. Doing this is a highly effective way to clarify your own thinking. Most of his ideas are listed are mundane, but others, like where he predicts something like quantum computers years before that became apparent are pretty cool to see.
- People seemed to be focusing on the fact that this wouldn’t break the NIST leading PQC public key cryptosystem, but I think that misses the point. This takes a problem at the core of this security, which previously only had an exponential approximation, and finds a polynomial approximation. Sure that polynomial is too high O(n^4.5) to break the leading proposed systems, but I mean are you really feeling safe when an exponential just changed to a polynomial?
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.
- My favorite Serra story is when he was hired to build a sculpture by Caltech. In typical fashion he decided he wanted to build a giant wall across one of the few remaining wide open green spaces on campus, the lawn adjacent to Beckman. In a nod to Caltech he called it “Vectors”.
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.
- One distinction is maybe between the way the world works and way we humans work, with our language and our unconscious. My read is that Cormac is deeply skeptical of the rational story our language tells us, and that we overlook and ignore the role of the unconscious, but that this is a statement about our own internal universe, and not the universe at large. Whether the universe is organized and symbolic, I don’t get a read, but he certainly seems skeptical that we can cross this divide, especially only with language. I can see how this feels a bit against science, but I guess this feels very much at philosophy of science level (so maybe more tame but also more interesting)
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.
- I'm surprised you find the Kekulé Problem not supporting that he liked science. I think of it more as pointing out that the unconsciousness has been ignored scientifically, but he certainly frames it as a question of science: "The unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." "To repeat. The unconscious is a biological operative and language is not."
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/
- Yes, for some definition of logical qubit.
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.
- "but the physics of it is relatively straightforward."
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.
- For why you should basically ignore this paper because it is "both novel and correct, but not in the same places" see Scott's writeup https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7143
- 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.