Dejà Vu???

“The way I thought about it was that we’d have succeeded if: (a) someone bought one for more than $10M; (b) it was clearly using quantum mechanics to do its thing; and (c) it was better at something than any other option available. Now all of these have been accomplished, and the original objectives that we’d set for ourselves have all been met.” (Geordie Rose, 2013, source)

While D-Wave investor Steve Jurvetson predicts that D-Wave’s computers will soon run “faster than the universe”, in a different planet, Scott Aaronson and Greg Kuperberg claim D-wave’s computers show no speedups and are “worth $0″. Luckily for D-Wave, the public will never read 300++ blog comments. I confess I have no life, so I’ve read most of them.

We’ll soon find out who’s right, probably in less than a year’s time.

Personally, my opinion on the matter is very bland and boring. I believe that in the future, gate model QCs will outshine D-wave’s QCs (because they allow better error correction), but for now we can learn some interesting physics and engineering from D-wave’s QCs.

(Prediction is very hard, especially about the future – Yogi Berra)

Faster Than the Universe!

“A year later, it outperforms all computers on Earth combined. Double qubits again the following year, and it outperforms the universe.”
Steve Jurvetson 2012, describing his Rosy Law.

This quote comes from an awesome essay entitled “Rose’s Law for Quantum Computers” that I think should be required reading for all QC aficionados, especially Californians. Scott Aaronson reads it to his daughter Lily every night. It’s that good!

Jurvetson is a partner in Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture capital firm that has invested a lot of moolah in D-Wave. Jurvetson posted this essay on something called Flickr, an internet company in which his VC firm has also invested. Flickr is owned by Yahoo, another internet company that you probably never use either. The full essay is posted in the comments below, in case Flickr vanishes long before WordPress does.

Fox News Poll: Who Won (or is Winning) the Aaronson/Lubos Debate

Remember: Vote early and vote often!

The debate of the century!
The debate that polarized the world and tore countless families apart.

The debaters: Scott Aaronson Versus Lubos Motl
Topics being debated tonight: Is Complexity Theory just a science based on conjectures? Are those conjectures even right, or that fundamental, or of any importance to Physics? Are Complexity Theorists too political, clannish and dismissive of others? Do they sometimes give themselves all the credit for inventing the wheel? Did they really invent physics? Which one would you hire: a complexity theorist, a computer programmer or a string theorist? Would you hire Lubos? Would you hire Aaronson?
Topics not being debated tonight: Will (gate model) quantum computers ever be built? Both debaters believe that they will be.
Venues (in inverse chronological order): (sorry for the preponderance of Lubos links, but, shit!, the guy does have stamina, and, unlike Lubos, no complexity theorist has reviewed Scott’s book in their blog, so far, that I know of)

• (Lubos) Short questions often require long answers and proofs

• (Boaz Barak) Reasons to care: In honor of Scott Aaronson

• (Lubos) Comparing the depth of the millennium problems

• (Lubos) Aaronson’s anthropic dilemmas

• (Lubos) Democritus on the QM operating system

• (Lubos) Minds and Machines

• (Lubos) Scott Aaronson: a prototype of some confusion of IT scientists about physics

“Quantum Computing Since Democritus” (Cover of Czech Edition, the Lubos Motl translation)

Scott Aaronson at Work

Pooch Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and Doggie Q-Spectacles

For more than a decade, John Preskill has been illustrating Bell’s inequality and related concepts with pictures of balls of two colors (red and green) that can be inserted into a box with two doors, door 1 on the top side, and door 2 on the front side. Here is a small sample of his art work:

Personally, I prefer explaining Bell’s inequality using Bayesian networks. It’s clearer that way, at least to me. I’ve been explaining Bell’s inequalities that way ever since I wrote the manual for my software Quantum Fog more than a decade ago. I’ve also explained them that way previously in this blog in the post entitled “Bell’s inequality for the Bayesian statistician“. Here is a sample of my art work from that previous blog post of mine:

John’s fine art work has made me realize that mine is grievously lacking in empathic cues (i.e., it’s pretty dull). If I had to give a public lecture accessible to non-scientists, I would fail miserably, unless…I enhanced the bayesian networks experience by adding some dog pictures. (if you are a quantum complexity theorist, instead of dogs, you might prefer to add some pictures of yourself in various dashing poses.)

As shown by the above figure of a Bayesian network, Bell’s inequality leads us to consider a variable where for Alice and for Bob. denotes the axis along which Alice measures the spin and the one for Bob. (For the CHSH inequality, one has and instead.)

The pooch interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that there are three dogs named Alice, Bob and Mimi that have poor eyesight and require spectacles in order to see/measure an atom, which looks to them like a fuzzy glob without their spectacles on, but which looks like either a cat or a squirrel with the spectacles on.

(Previous work: Dogs Playing Poker)

The “Preskill’s 2 balls” model can be mapped into the pooch model as follows.

Replace persons Alice, Bob and Eve by spectacle-wearing dogs named Alice, Bob and Mimi.

Alice

Bob

Mimi

Replace doors 1,2,3… by spectacles with lens types labeled A,B,C, etc. A and B might correspond to linearly polarized and circularly polarized.

Replace red and green balls by pictures of a cat and squirrel. These might correspond to the measurement values of 0 or 1 for the state of a qubit.

Squirrel!! Ruff, Ruff

Cat!! Ruff, Ruff

Here is a summary in tabular form of these 2 leading interpretations of quantum mechanics

Variables	Preskill’s model	Pooch model
	(Persons) Alice, Bob, Eve	(Dogs) Alice, Bob, Mimi
	doors 1,2,3	spectacles A, B, C
	green, red balls	cat, squirrel

And here is monogamy for dogs:

That Lazaridis Sure Can Pick Them Winners

Check out this recent article

BlackBerry CEO says tablets will be useless in five years, by Roger Cheng
(CNET) April 30, 2013

excerpt:

“BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins is not a fan of tablets.
…
“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” he said to Bloomberg.

We QC aficionados have a soft spot for Lazaridis, cofounder of BlackBerry. We feel sympathy for him. The BlackBerry company, his baby, seems to be sinking inexorably into a black hole. Plus we are grateful to him. The guy is a fervent believer in QCs and has donated something like $300 million of his private fortune to Perimeter and IQC. More recently, just last month. Lazaridis and some friends unveiled a hedge fund that will invest $100 million in QC research companies based in the Waterloo, Ontario area.

Unfortunately, so far, Lazaridis has gotten ZERO QC bang for his buck. See the following previous posts of mine about Perimeter and IQC if you want to laugh and cry

• The Blackberry Quantum Computer

• Perimeter announces Issac Newton Chair

• OMG! OMG! OMG! Quantum Mechanics

• Purveyors of Quantum Bustle Skirts

• The Chimps of Quantum Computing

I think one major reason that Lazaridis’ QC dreams are faltering is that he has a terrible nose for sniffing out good leaders for his companies. Furthermore, once it becomes painfully obvious that the leaders he has selected stink, he is glacially slow to replace them.

The above CNET article speaks volumes about his handpicked successor for BlackBerry, Thorsten Heins. Besides Heins, Lazarides’ choices for Perimeter and IQC leaders (namely, Neil Turok, director (for life?) of Perimeter, and Raymond Laflamme, director (for life?) of IQC), also seem to be somewhat amiss. Indeed, after many years of trying, and after spending a deep purse of gold, Perimeter and IQC have contributed virtually nothing to building a quantum computer. They are far behind places like D-Wave, NIST, UCSB, Yale, IBM, Holland. Australia, etc.

I should mention that there are many others who hold a different opinion than mine about the efficacy of Turok and Laflamme. For example, Lubos Motl thinks very highly of the intellectual depth and honesty of Perimeter saints and leaders like Neil Turok and Lee Smolin. Lazaridis should Google up some of Lubos’ opinions about those two.

Judea Pearl’s Do-Calculus for Ranchers

Check out my new paper

Introduction to Judea Pearl’s Do-Calculus (arXiv:1305.5506)

It’s a purely pedagogical paper with no new results. Its goal is to give a fairly self-contained introduction to Judea Pearl’s Do-Calculus, including proofs of his 3 rules.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, lately I’ve been obsessed with Judea Pearl’s causality theory. Eventually, I want to adapt it to quantum mechanics. I already have some nice ideas about how to do that, but this paper has the much more modest goal of introducing the reader to one of Pearl’s early, landmark papers about causality, R218-B, published in 1995.

This paper of mine is my way of dipping my toes into the strong river of knowledge that is Pearl’s causality theory. In order to understand Pearl’s work better, I forced myself to give a mini-lecture about it to a small group of my local friends. Then I turned those mad ravings into something that resembles the thoughts of a sane person and wrote that up.

While writing this paper, I kept on thinking that the nodes of a Bayesian network resemble cows, a whole herd of them enclosed in several corrals. From this perspective, the d-separation theorem began to make a lot of sense to me as a statement about bovine traffic between the corrals. That’s why I titled this blog post “do-calculus for ranchers” (also for cows, cowhands and rustlers). Okay, my paper mentions the cow analogy only very briefly. It’s mentioned in only one or two sentences in the whole 16 page paper. So you might still enjoy the paper, even if you aren’t too interested in my cow application.

Stephen Wolfram Reviews “Quantum Computing Since Democritus”

Oh boy! Stephen Wolfram just posted at Amazon.com the following critique of Scott Aaronson’s new book, “Quantum Computing Since Democritus”. Apparently these two don’t talk to each other ever since Scott wrote a particularly acerbic review of Wolfram’s book, “A New Kind of Science”. I’m reprinting below the entire Wolfram review of Scott’s book:

Reviewer: Stephen Wolfram (April 1, 2013)

Scott Aaronson thinks that he can derive all of physics from just one silly idea from computer science, what is called cellular automata Rule 110 complexity theory. Good luck Mr. Aaronson!

I think Scott Aaronson has delusions of grandeur. Even the title of his book: “A New Kind of Science, Quantum Computing Since Democritus” sounds a bit pretentious to me. Mr. Aaronson thinks he can write a really fat book about everything under the sun and that everyone is going to rush to read every word of it. Good luck Mr. Aaronson!

Mr. Aaronson could have chosen to write a nice slim volume like Hawking’s “A Brief history of Time”, and just like Hawking, he could have had in his hands a runaway bestseller, very popular among housewives and in their book reading clubs. But no! Instead he chose to write a book which is neither fish nor fowl. Too big and technical to be suitable for housewives, and too sketchy to be satisfying to their scientist husbands. I predict that very few people will buy his book, which has the exorbitant price of $35.99 in paperback.

Even though he has only been trained as a theoretical computer scientist (a hopelessly unemployable and unproductive clan not to be confused with that of computer programmers, to which I belong here at Mathematica), Aaronson honestly believes that he invented quantum mechanics for the first time and that he understands it better than the vast majority of physicists, dead or alive, better even than me, an ex-high energy physicist trained at Eton, Oxford, Caltech and Princeton, and better than other towering figures of 20th century physics like Michio Kaku or Seth Lloyd.

The cover of Aaronson’s book also sucks. Who wants to buy a book with a portrait of Aaronson (coming out of the shower?) on the front cover. I’m sorry if he is a blind Greek philosopher noted for his bad jokes and for long lists of blog comments, but that’s besides the point. The guy is no movie star. Couldn’t he have substituted his portrait by that of a nice, friendly dog, wagging its tail, or one of a buxom blonde lady in a strapless, for example. I mean, honestly, would you have bought “A New Kind of Science” if I had ignored the objections of my publisher and put a portrait of myself on its front cover as I wanted?

Before buying, I recommend to the reader that he/she wait until the free MOOC version of the book comes out, or until it can be found at yard sales for 50 cents.

Thurston Howell the 3rd Wins coveted Scientific Prize

You’ve probably heard of the Yuri Milner, Nobel, Fields, Turing, Abel, Wolf, Nevalinna, Polya, Clay, Dirac, Newton, etc., etc., etc. prizes. Recently, some mayor corporations have realized that academics are onto something very good here. They think this prize awarding practice is highly beneficial to society, so they are trying to incorporate it into their own ecosystem. Check out the following exciting news item that I came across today:

Thurston Howell the 3rd Wins coveted Scientific Prize
(Boston Globe- April 1, 2013)

Jet-setting from all corners of the globe, the top 3-dozen executives of mega corporation “Science Are Us” convened today in Boston. They plan to hold tomorrow a lavish celebration during which they will award the coveted Golden Coconut Prize to one of their own, Dr. Thurston Howell the 3rd (TH to his friends).

All conference attendees that we interviewed for this article thought that TH richly deserves the Golden Coconut prize. “TH is so brilliant! He reminds me of myself”, said one conference attendee, a “Science Are Us” executive himself. “TH is the wisest man I know. He gave me my first job at “Science Are Us” “, said another. “TH? That guy is excellent at everything he does. He can do math and physics, sing, dance, act, paint, play all sports, write novels, be a good father and teacher… better than anyone else in the world.” said another. “No one is more generous and altruistic than TH. Paul Farmer? Paul Farmer cannot hold a candle to TH. What has Paul Farmer ever done for me?”, said another.

The conference ended with a surprise announcement that a panel had been empowered to select in 6 months time the winner of a 3 million dollar prize to be given to another of the top executives of “Science Are Us”. The prize will be awarded to the proponent of the craziest untested business theory. Said a “Science Are Us” spokesperson: “A 3 million dollar prize given to one of our already rich top executives is sure to inspire and attract the best sort of young people to come to work for our corporation, and it will be invaluable in helping those insolvent youngsters to follow that path. This prize is for you, that half of the world’s population that earns less than 3 dollars a day. We think that the prospect of someday winning this prize will cheer you up, and induce you to learn more science.”

“Science Are Us” is at the forefront of its scientific field, especially when it comes to procuring federal contracts. It attributes its wild success to its academia-like practices and atmosphere. Just last year, it revolutionized the corporate world by instituting the practice of giving lifetime tenure to all of its top executives. Said a company spokesperson: “By giving tenure to all our top executives, we guarantee unparalleled stability to our company. Investors love us because they hate the uncertainty introduced by changes of personnel. They also like plucky executives that are willing to think out of the box without fear of reprisals by stock holders.”

Quantum Computers Do Primes Too

Check out this recent ArXiv paper in which 2 Spaniards, José Latorre and Germán Sierra, give an qubit circuit that produces a quantum superposition of all the prime numbers less than . They also show how further QC processing of this superposition of primes can be done to calculate the prime counting function . Their QC algorithm can calculate quadratically more efficiently than a classical computer. This permits a QC to probe for much higher values than a classical computer, if both computers have the same amount of time to calculate. Here is a decent, popular press article about their paper, courtesy of the website “I-Programmer”.

I am often asked for a practical example of the use of Grover’s algorithm. Well, this prime thingie is a very nice example, although it assumes some interest in Number Theory and familiarity with it.

Grover’s algorithm is near and dear to my heart, because I use it in my computer program called “Quibbs”(a QC circuit generator written in JAVA) . In Quibbs, I use my own, home-brewed, fixed-point version of Grover’s algorithm to sample any probability distribution inputted in the form of a classical Bayesian network.

Number Theory shows up infrequently in present day physical theories, but it does show up frequently in computer science algorithms and it has deep connections with group theory (Langlands program), and physicists are always interested in group theory. Hence, maybe in the future, physicists will use Number Theory much more often than they do today.