eigenket

I don't know anything about this specific LLM thing but if it correctly uses the Nash bargaining optimiser then that won't happen.

This thing you point out is exactly why Nash demanded invariance under affine transformations in his solution. Using completely arbitrary units if I rank everything as having importance 1 million, that's exactly the same as ranking everything as having importance 1, and also the same as ranking everything as having importance 0.

The solution is only sensitive to diffences in the unitity function, not the actual values of the function. If you want to weight something very strongly in the Nash version of the game you also have to weight other things correspondingly weakly.

I would say almost exactly the opposite is happening. Academia generally publishes it's results relatively freely but academic AI research is largely being left in the dust by large corporations who do not find it in their interest to publicly describe the "magic dust" that makes their products work.

Yeah the whole entangled system is present and interacting with the "thermal ancilla" in their setup.

This graph [1] available on Wikipedia answers this question. The level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere (in the southern hemisphere) roughly doubled between 1955 and 1963 ish. This coincides with the era of above ground nuclear testing. Since then it has been decaying back to the baseline.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14#/media/File%3ARadioc...

There is not an "OS" or anything even remotely like it. For now these things behave more like physics experiments than computers.

You can play around with "quantum programming" through (e.g.) some of IBM's offerings and there has been work on quantum programming languages like q# from Microsoft but its unclear (to me) how useful these are.

I'm not sure what that has to do with my previous comment but yeah, pushing the boundaries of science is kinda difficult and you can make mistakes.

My understanding is that they pretty convincingly showed that the thing they built acts as a qubit. This means that if its not doing what they think its doing (the "topological" / Majorana stuff) then they accidentally made a qubit which works some other way. That isn't outside the realm of possibility but it is fairly unlikely.

The Majorana particles in Microsoft's set-up are "quasi-particles". They aren't really fundamental particles, but excitations in the system which behave (roughly, in some appropriate sense) like particles. They aren't neutrinos.

The point is that Grothendieck, easily one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, who regularly proved deep and fundamental facts about prime numbers, cared so little about particular numbers that he accidentally gave an easy to see non-prime as an example of a prime.

He was used to working on completely different levels of abstraction, so when faced with concrete numbers he could easily make a mistake that a school-child (or hacker news commenter) could spot.

The formal class is called BQP, in analogy with the classical complexity clas BPP. BQP contains BPP but there is no proof that it is stictly bigger (such a proof would imply P != NP). There are problems in BQP we expect are not in BPP but its not clear if there are any useful problems in BQP and not in BPP, other than essentially Shor's algorithm.

On the other hand it's actually not completely necessary to have a superpolynomial quantum advantage in order to have some quantum advantage. A quantum computer running in quadratic time is still (probably) more useful than a classical computer running in O(n^100) time, even though they're both technically polynomial. An example of this is classical algorithms for simulating quantum circuits with bounded error whose runtime is like n^(1/eps) where eps is the error. If you pick eps=0.01 you've got a technically polynomial runtime classical algorithm but it's runtime is gonna be n^100, which is likely very large.

The I can locally do stuff is completely understood theoretically/mathematically. I hand waved because this isn't a forum where those technicalities are particuarly relevant.

Its been well understood since at least 1993

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.71...

I don't think it's completely clear (to me) that quantum networking is an oxymoron. I would enthusiastically agree that its very complicated and the real world use cases are incredibly limited.

As far as your routing/switching qualms go I think they are mostly addressed by entanglement swapping? Person A and person B can each make an entangled pair and send me half, and I can (locally) do stuff which leads to the halves they keep at home becoming entangled. Then they can use teleportation or whatever to do whatever they want between themselves without me knowing anything about it.

Neither of Gödel's two incompleteness theorems apply to quantum mechanics.

The two theorems apply to logical systems which prove facts about the natural numbers. While this is an incredibly broad class of things, it doesn't include physical theories like quantum mechanics.

Nuclear weapons (based on quantum mechanics and special relativity) were used less than 6 years after that quote.

Why doesn't this experimental result count as requiring explanation?

We know (for example) silver atoms have mass, and that massive objects exert gravity (which we understand as warping of space-time according to GR).

We know that we can put silver atoms in quantum superpositions of being in different positions (for example in a sequential Stern-Gerlach type experiment).

We have (essentially) absolutely no theoretical understanding of what is going on to space-time when a thing with mass is in such a superposition. Quantum mechanics does not successfully model gravity, and general relativity contains no superpositions, so the situation is completely beyond our theoretical understanding. This isn't a theoretical consideration, this is something real that you can do in an undergrad physics lab experiment pretty easily.

Now the problem is that the models we have developed so far to deal with this situation turned out to be (wildly) too difficult for us to test. I think it is very far from clear that the Oppenheim & co model falls into this category - imo its completely reasonable for them to be spending theoretical effort working out what is needed to test their model.

I would say that's an overly simplistic view. The only way we ever obtain testable things is by working on things which are not currently testable.

von Neumann probably

I kinda doubt it. The kind of people who end up nominating people for Nobels or even making the decisions on these aren't really struggling for grant funding.

Computer science has the Turing award and mathematics the Fields medal. Neither is exactly equivalent to the Nobel but they're similar levels of prestige.

The Nobel prize fields and criteria are a bit random, they're essentially just whatever Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.

"Vital" is completely subjective but I'd throw stuff around quantum information into the ring. Maybe you'd consider the loop-hole free Bell tests performed in 2015 and awarded the 2022 Nobel prize to count?

He unironically should

I think this is (very) inaccurate. It feels more like them trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon (machine learning/AI hype is huge).

Physics as a discipline hasn't really stalled at all. Fundamental physics arguably has, because no one really has any idea how to get close to making experimental tests that would distinguish the competing ideas. But even in fundamental physics there are cool developments like the stuff from Jonathan Oppenheim and collaborators in the last couple of years.

That said "physics" != "fundamental physics" and physics of composite systems ranging from correlated electron systems, and condensed matter through to galaxies and cosmology is very far from dead.

I don't think that's a super helpful description, because probably most people wouldn't call IO a datastructure.

There are many protocols for quantum key distribution/exchange so it's hard to answer fully without knowing which one you're talking about. That said their are protocols, like the one invented by Artur Ekert in 1991, which use entanglement in an essential way to transmit the key. Even in the absence of an evesdropper the protocol will not work without entanglement. It escapes the no-communication theorem by also requiring some classical communication.

Its probably mostly because you have an intuitive idea that there is some concept of "now" which is independent of the observer.

In special relativity this global "now" isn't a thing. It doesn't exist. There is no global now. Different observers who are in different places and/or moving at different speeds will describe different events as simultaneous.

In particular say we have an observer who sees an event A happening at time 0, and a second event (call it B) at time t and the distance between them is greater than c t. Then you can find observers who see A happening first, B happening first or the two happening at the same time. However all observers will agree that the distance between the events was greater than c times the time between them.

This seems like it would cause problems with causality, but it doesn't because we need the distance to be greater than c times the time, which means no lightspeed signal could get from A to B. If you allow ftl communication then this "escape" doesn't work anymore, and causality can be explicitly broken.

The issue the person above is alluding to is known as the no communication theorem.

It has a wiki page

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

But the upshot is basically that entanglement doesn't let you do anything unless you send some classical data as well.

While the second and third parts if your comment are complete true, the first part

Entanglement isn't particularly useful for communication

I would say is false. Entanglement lets you do some fun and theoretically useful stuff for communication tasks. At the most basic level sharing entanglement lets you upgrade a classical communication channels you have into a quantum one (sending 2 bits and burning an entangled pair lets you send a qubit). You can do increasing fancy stuff if you so wish, if you are sufficiently paranoid you might be interested in device independent cryptography, which is only possible because of entanglement.

You chose an interesting point to stop replying to these comments!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40656550

This is a comment I made on hackernews, replying to someone who (IIRC) claimed to be German but (in my opinion) was clearly a Russian astroturfing account.

After I mentioned it they deleted their comments, and they have since all been flagged by the moderators here.

That's because rational arithmetic is closed under addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Unless you divide by zero I guess

Its not remotely the same as the ready box, because the ready box sends its signal before the measurement directions have been chosen.

It would be equivalent to the ready box if your filtering happened without any reference to the measurement choices our outcomes.

If you're still unhappy with role of the ready box we can instead talk about either of the two purely photonic experiments which didn't use anything similar.

The universe tell you whether to select or not (it's not you missing events).

In your numerics it is exactly missing events, there are a bunch of events and you postselect to keep only some of them. If you mean a different model you're going to need a python script which does something else.

Nature's is fuzzy and experimenters will always have to define box boundaries (spatial, temporal, and entanglement-pair selection boxes)

Sure, but in each of the experiments I linked the selection in the experiments loses a small enough fraction of the events that the detection loophole is closed.