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I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

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Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#231

Post by ScottAaronson »

hirundo wrote: post #158

Hi Scott, I'm astounded by the accomplishment of AlphaZero in quickly becoming a chess master without chess specific programming. Could a program of the same kind be adapted to infer or deduce the rules of chess from a large set of valid games? Or is that a different kind of problem? If so, could it be adapted to learn the rules when we're not clear on them either, like those for the games of love or politics?

You should probably wait for an AMA with someone who's actually an expert in AI, and ask them this question.

Since you asked me, though, I did a quick Google search and found the following paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.09667.pdf

where indeed they use machine learning to induce the rules of chess from a large number of played games (and then learn to play better than any human). It doesn't surprise me at all that this would be feasible with current tools, although I haven't studied the paper yet, and would be curious to know how many games you need before you've learned all the rules around, e.g., castling, en passant, promotion of pawns, and perpetual check.

My guess is that for a machine to learn the rules of the games of love and politics will take somewhat longer. :-)

Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#233

Post by ScottAaronson »

phs wrote: post #112
ScottAaronson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels really uncomfortable that, if you have infinitely many people wearing red or blue hats that they can't see, then they can all guess their own hat color with only finitely many of them being wrong. Not to mention Banach-Tarski and a hundred other strange phenomena. This all militates toward rejecting AC. But then, if we reject AC, we can have infinite sets that are incomparable (i.e., they're not isomorphic a…

As a follow-up, what is your position on intuitionist/constructivist logic?

I don't begrudge others their sincerely held faiths! But I confess that I haven't yet seen the need for nonstandard logics for anything I've personally been interested in.

Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#234

Post by dreamcompiler »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #217
ScottAaronson wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I do think there's a significant chance of that. If it happens, my main interest would be to understand WHY. What are the non-obvious limitations that you mention? What is true about the world that makes it seem to have this exponential explosion of amplitudes, yet makes it impossible or infeasible to harness them for computation? The depressing possibility, of course, is that we never succeed in building useful…

There's a famous study somewhere showing that people interpret phrases describing probabilities differently. By "significant chance" do you mean something like 10% or something like 70%?

He means (-40 + 17i)%.

Sorry, couldn't resist :-)

Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#235

Post by ScottAaronson »

akeck wrote: post #174

I think you've written that QM is in part probability math using complex numbers. I've also read that human decision making doesn't map well to classical probability. Do you know if QM/"complex probability" has been used to build better models of human decision making?

Every few months there's another paper on the arXiv trying to do exactly that. Pretty much without exception, I've found the papers to be terrible -- leaping immediately to QM without first considering more prosaic stories for whatever human behavior they're trying to explain. It's like quantum mechanics is a hammer, and explaining human decision-making is a steak, and all these people want to use the hammer to slice the steak for some weird reason, their strongest argument being that the problem of slicing the steak doesn't map well to their bare fingers. It's amazing what some people think they can get others to swallow just by using the word "quantum"! :-)

Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#236

Post by OscarCunningham »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #234
OscarCunningham wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a famous study somewhere showing that people interpret phrases describing probabilities differently. By "significant chance" do you mean something like 10% or something like 70%?

He means (-40 + 17i)%. Sorry, couldn't resist :-)

I think you have to find the "perdec" symbol on your keyboard. That way you'll get a percentage when you square it.

Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#237

Post by AgentME »

martin1975 wrote: post #196
JakeTyo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You simply can't something 'physics' if its not testable. :)

That word 'testable', is very loaded. :) But I get what you mean. Are there things that we can't test that do exist?

>Are there things that we can't test that do exist?

There's many reasons to believe that objects that exit our light cone continue to exist after they do, even though they could never have any future interaction with us to confirm that. (Say a spaceship leaves Earth at near the speed of light in a straight line, and then enough time passes that the space between the ship and Earth is expanding so fast that the spaceship or any kind of signal from the spaceship would have to travel faster than light to return to Earth, which is impossible. Believing that the spaceship disappears when it exits our light cone requires believing in unnecessarily more complicated physics.)

Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#238

Post by dreamcompiler »

hirundo wrote: post #158

Hi Scott, I'm astounded by the accomplishment of AlphaZero in quickly becoming a chess master without chess specific programming. Could a program of the same kind be adapted to infer or deduce the rules of chess from a large set of valid games? Or is that a different kind of problem? If so, could it be adapted to learn the rules when we're not clear on them either, like those for the games of love or politics?

Most of the rules of chess are trivial and thus should be deducible from observing less than one complete game. Rare things like castling might take a couple of games.

Love and politics have rulesets that are many orders of magnitude more complex; so complex that we don't even know how to write them all down.

Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#239

Post by noobermin »

mpodlasin wrote: post #135

What would be your advice for older (25+) people who want to get into science? Is it even possible? Or should I just accept that the train has left and focus on something else? Can you develop your math/logic/critical thinking skills at that point? How about if you never excelled at these topics in school? Is hard work enough, or do you think some people are born with these talents?

I don't think you can't, but you have to be aware of the demands graduate school makes on students, including working long hours on course work first and then actual research. If you are older with more commitments, it's just harder to commit to. It can also be pretty isolating, especially given that most of your fellow graduate students will be a bit younger than you (as well as being quite immature, as many have never had an actual career and come straight from college). By the way, what I've explained isn't great, it's terrible, but it's the system that exists now.

Of course, this is just a warning, just be aware of what you're getting into.

Re: I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA

#240

Post by ScottAaronson »

JakeTyo wrote: post #118

Why don't we call Qbits just "qits". Since Quantum-Binary-Digit doesn't really make sense. Do people in the field refer to them in other ways?

No, they're called qubits. It's literally a quantum-mechanical bit, in the sense that it's a superposition of the |0> and |1> states---i.e., a quantum state that returns a bit when you make a complete measurement on it.

There are also qutrits, which are quantum trits (superpositions of |0>, |1>, and |2>), "qubytes" (collections of 8 qubits), and so on.

This terminology is now 30 years old, and in probably thousands of books and tens of thousands of papers. It's not going to change.

The earlier name for "qubit"---the name that Feynman, for example, would have recognized---was "spin-1/2 particle." But while there was some resistance, I think that even within particle physics, condensed-matter physics, etc., they'd now typically say qubit rather than spin-1/2.

In any case, would you pronounce "qit" like "kit" or "kwit"? :-)

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