Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Can we all take a moment to appreciate this absolutely wild take from Googleās latest quantum press release (bolding mine) https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/
The more I think about it the stupider it gets. Iād love if someone with an actual physics background were to comment on it. But my layman take is it reads as nonsense to the point of being irresponsible scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.
Does it also destroy all the universes where the question was answered wrong?
One of these days weāll get the quantum bogosort working.
āQuantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneouslyā is a lazy take trotted out by people who want to believe in parallel worlds. It is a bad mental image, because it gives the misleading impression that a quantum computer could speed up anything. But all the indications from the actual math are that quantum computers would be better at some tasks than at others. (If you want to use the names that CS people have invented for complexity classes, this imagery would lead you to think that quantum computers could whack any problem in EXPSPACE. But the actual complexity class for āproblems efficiently solvable on a quantum computerā, BQP, is known to be contained in PSPACE, which is strictly smaller than EXPSPACE.) It also completely obscures the very important point that some tasks look like theyād need a quantum computer ā the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that ā but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean youād never imagine the GottesmanāKnill theorem could be true.
To quote a paper by Andy Steane, one of the early contributors to quantum error correction:
Tangentially, I know about nothing of quantum mechanics but lately Iāve been very annoyed alone in my head at (the popular perception of?) many-world theory in general. From what Iām understanding about it, there are two possibilities: either itās pure metaphysics, in which case who cares? or itās a truism, i.e. if we model things that way that makes it so we can talk about reality in this way. Thisā¦ might be true of all quantum interpretations, but many-world annoys me more because itās such a literal vision trying to be cool.
I donāt know, tell me if Iām off the mark!
Thereās a whole lot of assuming-the-conclusion in advocacy for many-worlds interpretations ā sometimes from philosophers, and all the time from Yuddites online. If you make a whole bunch of tacit assumptions, starting with those about how mathematics relates to physical reality, you end up in MWI country. And if you make sure your assumptions stay tacit, you can act like an MWI is the only answer, and everyone else is being
un-mutualirrational.(I use the plural interpretations here because thereās not just one flavor of MWIce cream. The people who take it seriously have been arguing amongst one another about how to make it work for half a century now. What does it mean for one event to be more probable than another if all events always happen? When is one āworldā distinct from another? The arguments iterate like the construction of a fractal curve.)
Humans canāt help but return to questions the presocratics already struggled with. Makes me happy.
Unfortunately āstates of quantum systems form a vector space, and states are often usefully described as linear combinations of other statesā doesnāt make for good science fiction compared to āwhoa dude, like, the multiverse, man.ā
ālends credenceā? yeah, that smells like BS.
some marketing person probably saw that the time estimate of the conventional computation exceeded the age of the universe multiple times over, and decided that must mean multiple universes were somehow involved, because big number bigger than smaller number
It reads to me like either they got lucky or encountered a measurement error somewhere, but the peer review notes from Nature donāt show any call outs of obvious BS, though I donāt have any real academic science experience, much less in the specific field of quantum computing.
Then again, this may not be too far beyond the predicted boundaries of what quantum computers are capable of and while the assumption that computation is happening in alternate dimensions seems like it would require quantum physicists to agree on a lot more about interpretation than they currently do the actual performance is probably triggering some false positives in my BS detector.
The peer reviewers didnāt say anything about it because they never saw it: Itās an unilluminating comparison thrown into the press release but not included in the actual paper.
Maybe Iām being overzealous (I can do that sometimes).
But I donāt understand why this particular experiment suggests the multiverse. The logic appears to be something like:
But I donāt understand this argument at all. The universe is quantum, not classical. So why do other worlds need to help with the compute? Why does this experiment suggest it in particular? Why does it make sense for computational costs to be amortized across different worlds if those worlds will then have to go on to do other different quantum calculations than ours? It feels like thereās no āsavingsā anyway. Would a smaller quantum problem feasible to solve classically not imply a multiverse? If so, what exactly is the threshold?
I mean, unrestricted skepticism is the appropriate response to any press release, especially coming out of silicon valley megacorps these days. But I agree that this doesnāt seem like the kind of performance theyāre talking about wouldnāt somehow require extra-dimensional communication and computation, whatever that would even mean.
Indeed, Iāve been involved in crafting a silicon valley megacorp press release before. Iāve seen how the sausage is made! (Mine was more or less factual or I wouldnāt have put my name on it, but dear heavens a lot of wordsmithing goes into any official communication at megacorps)
these are some silly numbers. if all this is irreversible computation and if landauer principle holds and thereās no excessive trickery or creative accounting involved, then theyād need to dissipate something in range of 4.7E23 J at 1mK, or 112 Tt of TNT equivalent (112 million Mt)
(disclaimer - not a physicist)
The computation seems to be generating a uniformly random set and picking a sample of it. I can buy that itād be insanely expensive to do this on a classical computer, since thereās no reasonable way to generate a truly random set. Feels kinda like an unfair benchmark as this wouldnāt be something youād actually point a classical computer at, but then again, thatās how benchmarks work.
Iām not big in quantum, so I canāt say if thatās something a quantum computer can do, but I can accept the math, if not the marketing.
How do you figure? Itās absolutely possible in principle that a quantum computer can efficiently perform computations which would be extremely expensive to perform on a classical computer.