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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#11

Post by blr246 »

As a programmer and practitioner, I'm curious about what kinds of skills and training it takes to program quantum computers.

Can you shed some insight into what's really different about the tools and task of programming a quantum computer versus using classical programming languages and tools? Do you think quantum computer programming will rapidly become standard training for CS undergrads, or do you expect it to remain a niche skillset like FPGAs, etc, since it will only supplement and not replace classical computers.

Also, nice to meet you. Your essays have been inspiring over the years.

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

#12

Post by liamcardenas »

Thoughts on this comment?

"You don't actually want qubits, you want an analog computer with differentiable signals. Most likely photonic. Qubits are a dead evolution branch.

I've been recently exploring computational metamaterials for photonic computation.

http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~aalu/research%20-%20page%203.ht.... (there's quite a few papers on this but unfortunately they are all paywalled. Spoiler alert, they seem to be based entirely on Fourier transform).

These computational metamaterials don't need electricity to be powered (you need something that will shoot the photons on them and read back the values off tho).

Machine learning would be much, much faster on these as you have O(1) differential calculus.

They don't heat up. You can possibly build a house sized CPU out of these. I can see it, a city block sized CPU and a nuclear reactor next to it.

Did you know that on an analog machine, you can do sort in O(n)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort

Hit me up if you wanna chat about this. I've seen the "light" (xdddd) now and can't go back to stupid bits.

I'm not like super married to the metamaterials but analog photonic trumps quantum for just about every task I can think of."

- adamnemecek

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14674333

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

#15

Post by ScottAaronson »

r4um wrote: post #5

How far are we from "emergence" in terms of AI ecosystem ? Will quantum computing pave the way for it ?

Sorry, I don't know what "emergence" means in this context. If you mean AGI, I think (hope?) that we're still quite some ways away from it. Yes, quantum computing could help with AI -- for example through Grover's algorithm, which lets you solve many search, optimization, and planning problems in roughly the square root of the number of steps you would need classically. But it's a complicated story: many of the problems we care about will still be asymptotically hard even for quantum computers; conversely, as the spectacular recent achievements of deep learning and reinforcement learning (not to mention our own brains? :-) ) remind us, there's a great deal that can be done even with classical computers---often, outside the regime where we understand theoretically why the methods work. If you check back in 5 years or so, I'm optimistic that we'll know more about the applications of quantum computing to AI than we do right now.

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

#17

Post by n0mi1k »

If advanced quantum computing were available in smartphones and other small devices today, what applications would be possible that are not currently? (Or which would be greatly improved)

Would it affect the things many people do most on their phones like messaging, news and social media

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

#20

Post by danharaj »

A lot of machines that purport to solve an NP-hard problem in a short period of time have some trick that makes them impractical, like requiring the ability to reduce the noise floor in a signal exponentially or pump an exponential amount of energy into a system. Has it been shown that such physical resources are more-or-less interchangeable with running time for the purposes of complexity theory?
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