Cartoon aided design: The lighter side of computing

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To be fair I’m not really sure what his position is since he banned me for disagreeing without discussing it. Jon K. #65: Yes, as you say, these are issues that we’ve been over many, many times before here. See, for example, Part II of my American Scientist article, about Bell’s Theorem. The bottom line is that, if you wanted a hidden deterministic pattern to quantum measurement outcomes, then you would also need faster-than-light communication to coordinate the measurement outcomes between different parts of the universe. Of course, if determinism was infinitely important to you, then you could postulate as much nonlocality as you needed to get it, as ‘t Hooft does with his superdeterministic conspiracy theory. But you then face what, to my mind, is a fatal problem: namely, you’re now utterly unable to explain why our universe only allows precisely the nonlocal behavior predicted by quantum mechanics (such as winning the CHSH game 85% of the time), and not even more nonlocal behavior than that. Occam’s blade is trembling in its sheath. Entanglement is just something that unavoidably pops out when you have superposition and also a tensor product structure on your Hilbert space. It doesn’t need to be added as a separate axiom. And yes, things like the Bell inequality can be explicitly understood as interference effects. Anytime the simulation needs to simulate a random event, it would just use the next digit in PI (or any other pseudo-random sequence). I’m still trying to wrap my head around Scott’s point about preferred basis. I can’t work out what it means physically. I guess that means I will have to work on an actual understanding rather than just an intuitive one.

On the topic of experimental demonstration of quantum supremacy, in your initial paper on Boson Sampling with Alex, you proved that BS being efficiently solvable by a classical computer implies that the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the third level. Is there any hope for reducing the collapse level further? It seems like the primary barrier is that the universal hashing scheme gives rise to BPP I wonder what the Kolmogorov complexity size of that QM description would be, not including the seed? It’s true that technically, the program would need a random number generator to make the final selection of a measurement outcome, and have it “really” be random (rather than pseudorandom). But I’ve never seen that as such a big deal—as a challenge to the Church-Turing Thesis or whatever—because even a deterministic program can easily output a list of probabilities, so that the only thing left for you to do would be to “spin the wheel.”

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This Occam-compatible postulate explains, naturally and even (arguably) very beautifully, why present-day experiments and simulations alike readily exhibit low-dimension spukhafte Fernwirkungen (like photon interference), but exhibit high-dimension spukhafte Fernwirkungen (like scalable quantum computation) only with very great difficulty such demonstrations perhaps being impossible even principle (as Kalai’s preprints argue). A model is a mathematical construct that describes some aspect of the material world. It’s purpose is to make visualization easy and give us an intuition for it.

Gentzen’s remarks on density matrices (#24) are well-conceived and clearly stated (as they seem to me). Thanks! In a nutshell, Voevodsky’s philosophical agenda radically embraces, as a primary objective of mathematical practice, “to read and trust and enjoy, rather than doubt and work and eventually not read at all”; moreover Voevodsky sees “no other way for mathematics to prosper.” Yes, these philosophical ideas definitely are radical.🙂 So the phrase “Damned with faint praise” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise) came to mind when I read Dr Motl’s post. I’d love to post this comic on Facebook, but it’s too long for reading on mobile and that’s how most people (including me) read things. Do you have a version that’s chopped up? Would you like a version that’s chopped up? For instance, instead of:The universe is a self-modeling language, and there are 3 levels of recursion: Information>Fields>Cognition. Each level has it’s own ‘arrow of time’. I don’t expect that his book will ever be translated into English, but I hope that at least his concept of dynamic information and his conjecture that this dynamic information is conserved just like energy will find its way into discussions about quantum information theory. Maybe those discussions will show that his concept and conjecture is trivial or wrong, but I think that those discussions would be beneficial for highlighting to role of time dynamics in quantum mechanics. Not sure whether those are important for quantum information theory or not. (I hope I didn’t ran into that “damned by faint praise” issue again. In the part of Germany where I come from, praise is used “sparingly”.)