61–70 of 78 posts
Is this truly live or did they batch random numbers ahead of time?
Technical Details section of help explains "we buffer batches of coin flips in advance to ensure a responsive experience. Your coin flips are always drawn directly from a quantum circuit, though no necessarily in real-time."
Tangent, but interesting: how do you get fair samples from a biased coin? 1. You take a string of biased samples like 001011100101 2. you split it in pairs 00 10 11 10 01 01 3. you keep only pairs with a zero and a one in them 10 10 01 01 4. You assign 0 and 1 to them, e.g. 1 1 0 0, this is a fair sampling from an unbiased coin Why does it work? Because even if p(0) ≠ p(1), p(01) = p(10).
Damn, that is cool
Tangent, but interesting: how do you get fair samples from a biased coin? 1. You take a string of biased samples like 001011100101 2. you split it in pairs 00 10 11 10 01 01 3. you keep only pairs with a zero and a one in them 10 10 01 01 4. You assign 0 and 1 to them, e.g. 1 1 0 0, this is a fair sampling from an unbiased coin Why does it work? Because even if p(0) ≠ p(1), p(01) = p(10).
"An ideal unbiased coin might not correctly model a real coin, which could be biased slightly one way or another. After all, real life is rarely fair."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of discounting some of the results, can we alternate the value of the coin each toss? So on the first flip, heads is 0 and tails is 1, then on the next flip, heads is 1 and tails is 0.
That'll obtain the right average but won't have the same pairwise relations as an independent, unbiased coin. That's probably easiest to see if you imagine approaching an infinitely biased coin (100% heads, 0% tails). Your strategy alternates between 0 and 1 almost always. The listed strategy throws away most flips but gives actualy unbiased results when a pair does pass. Another way to look at it is from an entropy…
I picked "block of 64 with only a single tails" since it was simple, and I'm sure a mathematician could figure out how to optimize it much more, but my general point is to agree that there's definitely ways to get closer to the theoretical upper bound you mentioned.
A few years ago I heard a story on NPR about someone who built a site that also used the IBM quantum backend. They had you input a question about what you should do with your life (I think the example was "Should I grow a beard?"). Then the quantum backend would give you a yes or no answer. The idea here is that if you believe the many worlds interpretation then that quantum decision splits the universe in two, and i…
Tangent, but interesting: how do you get fair samples from a biased coin? 1. You take a string of biased samples like 001011100101 2. you split it in pairs 00 10 11 10 01 01 3. you keep only pairs with a zero and a one in them 10 10 01 01 4. You assign 0 and 1 to them, e.g. 1 1 0 0, this is a fair sampling from an unbiased coin Why does it work? Because even if p(0) ≠ p(1), p(01) = p(10).
Thank you for sharing! As a small remark, classical and quantum coins are equally susceptible to bias. So the initial intro is a bit misleading.
That said... as a demo of a stack using quantum cloud compute, it's all in good fun and I shouldn't be a stick in the mud.
The details for what a quantum coin flip is has the description "your friends will think you're a wizard."
Why? I certainly don't think I'm a wizard right now.
Is this truly live or did they batch random numbers ahead of time?
Technical Details section of help explains "we buffer batches of coin flips in advance to ensure a responsive experience. Your coin flips are always drawn directly from a quantum circuit, though no necessarily in real-time."
A few years ago I heard a story on NPR about someone who built a site that also used the IBM quantum backend. They had you input a question about what you should do with your life (I think the example was "Should I grow a beard?"). Then the quantum backend would give you a yes or no answer. The idea here is that if you believe the many worlds interpretation then that quantum decision splits the universe in two, and i…
That is a fun idea. With enough quantum computing power, we might be able to spawn enough universes fast enough to crash The Simulation. Maybe even escape containment and access the quantum hypervisor!