This strikes me as a perfect application for quantum computers---but I'm just an amateur, so I'd love to hear an expert opinion. My understanding is this 1982 talk by Feynman [1] more or less launched the study of quantum computers, and it's all about how they can carry a probabilistic value through their computations rather than a definite one. And one of the lessons from that paper (if I'm reading & remembering rig…
You have to take into account that quantum processes are governed by a kind of "randomness" that is different from the one in stochastic processes. Scott Aaronson explains the basics of quantum mechanics very succinctly in one of his lectures [1]. The exponential->polynomial speedup we might get from a quantum computer doesn't really apply to stochastic processes, because we can already execute them in polynomial tim…
Re: The State of Probabilistic Programming
#31I upvoted this comment as soon as I read it, but just to follow up: that link is amazing. I read lecture 9, then 10, 10.5, 11, . . . Eventually I bought the book and am reading it from the beginning. Godel and the Halting Problem has been a pet interest for ~17 years, and I've often wondered about implications similar to Penrose's argument. The recent death of a young promising friend has made me want to research these things more seriously, and Aaronson seems like a wonderful guide. Thank you so much!