Viewing profile — ScottAaronson

Thanks! In theoretical computer science as a whole, authorship is only for those who made a direct intellectual contribution. It’s one of the things I like best about the culture o…

No, I hadn't seen that paper; thanks! I don't want to comment on it without having studied it, except to mention that it doesn't make any reference to Forrelation.

Pretty much any intro to QC (and in particular, any of the intros I've written, and linked to elsewhere on this thread) will make the point about Hilbert space (that's what it's ca…

Results from inductive inference show that you’re not going to converge in general . In the specific case of chess, however, my point was that we, because we know the complete list…

Just as a quick followup: Avishay Tal has confirmed for me that, indeed, their proof still goes through if you replace the Fourier transform by any other unitary matrix with bounde…

Knowing more math than most of the people who you pass on the street, but at the same time having vastly inferior social skills to them, is something that you sort of get used to i…

I’m not sure I fully understand your argument, but if someone showed that they could perfectly predict the actions of the people around them, say hours or days into future, placing…

Short answer: not in any obvious way! Longer answer: whatever I have to say about possible implications of QC for the hard problem of consciousness, you can probably find in the fo…

No, I don’t think humanity is well placed to be responsible wielders of quantum computing. But the thing is, we’re even less well-placed to be responsible wielders of nuclear weapo…

When the quantum computation is finished, you suck it up and you measure. The entire point of the quantum algorithm was to set things up in such a way that, even as the measurement…

If you mean, quantum computers that would exploit a nonlinear term in the Schrödinger equation to solve NP-complete and even harder problems in polynomial time (as studied by Abram…

Honestly, almost all of the technical innovation in this breakthrough had to do with classical circuit complexity—-once you know my Forrelation problem, there’s almost no further i…

Right, but even if chess were infinite, we could still imagine an algorithm that would output the smallest explicit rule set that was consistent with all the games it had seen so f…

While I was on sabbatical: 7am - Wake up, eat breakfast, check email, help get daughter ready and walk her to school 9am - Back to sleep 2pm - Wake up again, shower, eat lunch, che…

My favorite part of my sabbatical in Tel Aviv was having some actual time to do research. My second-favorite part was the hummus. Forrelation is not a “guiding light for quantum de…

I think that the teaching of QM has already been impacted by quantum information—and I hope it gets impacted more, regardless of if and when we get useful QCs! To my mind, it’s jus…

If anything like that turned out to be true, and fundamental (rather than just an engineering limitation), I’d regard it as a shocking discovery that would overturn our current und…

The reason why the running time of Grover’s algorithm involves sqrt(n) has to do with the Pythagorean theorem—or if you like, the fact that quantum mechanics is based on the 2-norm…

There are at least two plausible solutions to the Dice Room, depending on whether you adopt SSA or SIA. I wish I knew something more insightful to say about it than that, but I sti…

It’s funny: when Philip Roth passed away recently, I was rereading some of his stuff, and thinking to myself, “why am I so terrible at writing?” If I have any tips, I guess they’d …

I hope in 5-10 years, but really I don’t know, and no one else does either.

There’s no question that celebrity can get to your head in this line of work. Every single time I get off my private plane somewhere, I’m mobbed by quantum complexity theory groupi…

I confess I get annoyed when people make arguments about the interpretation of quantum mechanics using complicated thought experiments involving lasers and mirrors. Why not just ta…

As far as I know, it would have zero effect on any of that ... unless you need to simulate quantum physics or chemistry, factor large integers, calculate discrete logarithms, or po…