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Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

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Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#7
post #3

Actual article is here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2014/04/is-there-... but Scott's blog has the comment section

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1781

Seems the mods or poster updated the link to point to the PBS site, this is Scott's blog if you want to read the comments diziet mentions.

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#8
Scott is making it really difficult for people to follow along. My initial reaction was "wtf am I looking at" followed shortly by "why wasn't the HN link pointed straight to the PBS article?". And clearly others agree given that the top comment at the moment is a PBS link.

No doubt the guy is competent but this just smells like a poorly executed attempt to move traffic to the blog. I fully expect it to get ignored as such despite the PBS article being good.

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#9
> What’s more, there are recent developments in quantum gravity that seem to support the opposite conclusion: that is, they hint that a standard quantum computer could efficiently simulate even quantum-gravitational processes, like the formation and evaporation of black holes. Most notably, the AdS/CFT correspondence, which emerged from string theory, posits a “duality” between two extremely different-looking kinds of theories. On one side of the duality is AdS (Anti de Sitter): a theory of quantum gravity for a hypothetical universe that has a negative cosmological constant, effectively causing the whole universe to be surrounded by a reflecting boundary. On the other side is a CFT (Conformal Field Theory): an “ordinary” quantum field theory, without gravity, that lives only on the boundary of the AdS space. The AdS/CFT correspondence, for which there’s now overwhelming evidence (though not yet a proof), says that any question about what happens in the AdS space can be translated into an “equivalent” question about the CFT, and vice versa.

If you would like to read more about this, the author of this article has another blog post [0] that discusses the Susskind paper "Computational Complexity and Black Hole Horizons" [1] in its first half.

They key point, for those who don't have time to read the post:

> On one side of the ring is AdS (Anti de Sitter), a quantum-gravitational theory in D spacetime dimensions—one where black holes can form and evaporate, etc., but on the other hand, the entire universe is surrounded by a reflecting boundary a finite distance away, to help keep everything nice and unitary. On the other side is CFT (Conformal Field Theory): an “ordinary” quantum field theory, with no gravity, that lives only on the (D-1)-dimensional “boundary” of the AdS space, and not in its interior “bulk.” The claim of AdS/CFT is that despite how different they look, these two theories are “equivalent,” in the sense that any calculation in one theory can be transformed to a calculation in the other theory that yields the same answer. Moreover, we get mileage this way, since a calculation that’s hard on the AdS side is often easy on the CFT side and vice versa.

[0] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1697

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.5674

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