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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t 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 Google’s 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. I’d 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 scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.
“Quantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneously” 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 “problems efficiently solvable on a quantum computer”, 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 they’d need a quantum computer — the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that — but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean you’d never imagine the Gottesman–Knill 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 I’ve been very annoyed alone in my head at (the popular perception of?) many-world theory in general. From what I’m understanding about it, there are two possibilities: either it’s pure metaphysics, in which case who cares? or it’s a truism, i.e. if we model things that way that makes it so we can talk about reality in this way. This… might be true of all quantum interpretations, but many-world annoys me more because it’s such a literal vision trying to be cool.
I don’t know, tell me if I’m off the mark!
There’s a whole lot of assuming-the-conclusion in advocacy for many-worlds interpretations — 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 there’s 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 “world” distinct from another? The arguments iterate like the construction of a fractal curve.)
Humans can’t help but return to questions the presocratics already struggled with. Makes me happy.
Unfortunately “states of quantum systems form a vector space, and states are often usefully described as linear combinations of other states” doesn’t make for good science fiction compared to “whoa dude, like, the multiverse, man.”
“lends credence”? 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
Does it also destroy all the universes where the question was answered wrong?
One of these days we’ll get the quantum bogosort working.
It reads to me like either they got lucky or encountered a measurement error somewhere, but the peer review notes from Nature don’t show any call outs of obvious BS, though I don’t 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 didn’t say anything about it because they never saw it: It’s an unilluminating comparison thrown into the press release but not included in the actual paper.
Maybe I’m being overzealous (I can do that sometimes).
But I don’t understand why this particular experiment suggests the multiverse. The logic appears to be something like:
But I don’t 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 there’s no “savings” 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 doesn’t seem like the kind of performance they’re talking about wouldn’t somehow require extra-dimensional communication and computation, whatever that would even mean.
Indeed, I’ve been involved in crafting a silicon valley megacorp press release before. I’ve seen how the sausage is made! (Mine was more or less factual or I wouldn’t 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 there’s no excessive trickery or creative accounting involved, then they’d 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)
How do you figure? It’s absolutely possible in principle that a quantum computer can efficiently perform computations which would be extremely expensive to perform on a classical computer.
The computation seems to be generating a uniformly random set and picking a sample of it. I can buy that it’d be insanely expensive to do this on a classical computer, since there’s no reasonable way to generate a truly random set. Feels kinda like an unfair benchmark as this wouldn’t be something you’d actually point a classical computer at, but then again, that’s how benchmarks work.
I’m not big in quantum, so I can’t say if that’s something a quantum computer can do, but I can accept the math, if not the marketing.