Review of Vivek Wadhwa’s Washington Post column on quantum computing

Various people pointed me to a Washington Post piece by Vivek Wadhwa, entitled “Quantum computers may be more of an immiment threat than AI.”  I know I’m late to the party, but in the spirit of Pete Wells’ famous New York Times “review” of Guy Fieri’s now-closed Times Square restaurant, I have a few questions that have been gnawing at me:

Mr. Wadhwa, when you decided to use the Traveling Salesman Problem as your go-to example of a problem that quantum computers can solve quickly, did the thought ever cross your mind that maybe you should look this stuff up first—let’s say, on Wikipedia?  Or that you should email one person—just one, anywhere on the planet—who works in quantum algorithms?

When you wrote of the Traveling Salesman Problem that “[i]t would take a laptop computer 1,000 years to compute the most efficient route between 22 cities”—how confident are you about that?  Willing to bet your house?  Your car?  How much would it blow your mind if I told you that a standard laptop, running a halfway decent algorithm, could handle 22 cities in a fraction of a second?

When you explained that quantum computing is “equivalent to opening a combination lock by trying every possible number and sequence simultaneously,” where did this knowledge come from?  Did it come from the same source you consulted before you pronounced the death of Bitcoin … in January 2016?

Had you wanted to consult someone who knew the first thing about quantum computing, the subject of your column, would you have been able to use a search engine to find one?  Or would you have simply found another “expert,” in the consulting or think-tank worlds, who “knew” the same things about quantum computing that you do?

Incidentally, when you wrote that quantum computing “could pose a greater burden on businesses than the Y2K computer bug did toward the end of the ’90s,” were you trying to communicate how large the burden might be?

And when you wrote that

[T]here is substantial progress in the development of algorithms that are “quantum safe.” One promising field is matrix multiplication, which takes advantage of the techniques that allow quantum computers to be able to analyze so much information.

—were you generating random text using one of those Markov chain programs?  If not, then what were you referring to?

Would you agree that the Washington Post has been a leader in investigative journalism exposing Trump’s malfeasance?  Do you, like me, consider them one of the most important venues on earth for people to be able to trust right now?  How does it happen that the Washington Post publishes a quantum computing piece filled with errors that would embarrass a high-school student doing a term project (and we won’t even count the reference to Stephen “Hawkings”—that’s a freebie)?

Were the fact-checkers home with the flu?  Did they give your column a pass simply because it was “perspective” rather than news?  Or did they trust you as a widely-published technology expert?  How does one become such an expert, anyway?

Thanks!

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Update (Feb. 21): For casual readers, Vivek Wadhwa quickly came into the comments section to try to defend himself—before leaving in a huff as a chorus of commenters tried to explain why he was wrong. As far as I know, he has not posted any corrections to his Washington Post piece. Wadhwa’s central defense was that he was simply repeating what Michelle Simmons, a noted quantum computing experimentalist in Australia, said in various talks in YouTube—which turns out to be largely true (though Wadhwa said explicitly that quantum computers could efficiently solve TSP, while Simmons mostly left this as an unstated implication). As a result, while Wadhwa should obviously have followed the journalistic practice of checking incredible-sounding claims—on Wikipedia if nowhere else!—before repeating them in the Washington Post, I now feel that Simmons shares in the responsibility for this. As John Preskill tweeted, an excellent lesson to draw from this affair is that everyone in our field needs to be careful to say things that are true when speaking to the public.