- I was extremely sorry to learn about the loss of Joe Polchinski, a few days ago, to brain cancer. Joe was a leading string theorist, one of the four co-discoverers of the AMPS firewall paradox, and one of the major figures in the Simons It from Qubit collaboration that I’ve been happy to be part of since its inception. I regret that I didn’t get to know Joe as well as I should have, but he was kind to me in all of our interactions. He’ll be missed by all who knew him.
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Edge has posted what will apparently be its final Annual Edge Question: “What is the last question?” They asked people to submit just a single, one sentence question “for which they’ll be remembered,” with no further explanation or elaboration. You can read mine, which not surprisingly is alphabetically the first. I tried to devise a single question that gestured toward the P vs. NP problem, and the ultimate physical limits of computation, and the prospects for superintelligent AI, and the enormity of what could be Platonically lying in wait for us within finite but exponentially search spaces, and the eternal nerd’s conundrum, of the ability to get the right answers to clearly-stated questions being so ineffectual in the actual world. I’m not thrilled with the result, but reading through the other questions makes it clear just how challenging it is to ask something that doesn’t boil down to: “When will the rest of the world recognize the importance of my research topic?”
- I’m now reaping the fruits of my decision to take a year-long sabbatical from talking to journalists. Ariel Bleicher, a writer for Quanta magazine, asked to interview me for an article she was writing about the difficulty of establishing quantum supremacy. I demurred, mentioning my sabbatical, and pointed her to others she could ask instead. Well, last week the article came out, and while much of it is quite good, it opens with an extended presentation of a forehead-bangingly wrong claim by Cristian Calude: namely, that the Deutsch-Jozsa problem (i.e. computing the parity of two bits) can be solved with one query even by a classical algorithm, so that (in effect) one of the central examples used in introductory quantum computing courses is a lie. This claim is based on a 2006 paper wherein, with all the benefits of theft over honest toil, Calude changes the query model so that you can evaluate not just the original oracle function f, but an extension of f to the complex numbers (!). Apparently Calude justifies this by saying that Deutsch also changed the problem, by allowing it to be solved with a quantum computer, so he gets to change the problem as well. The difference, of course, is that the quantum query complexity model is justified by its relevance for quantum algorithms, and (ultimately) by quantum mechanics being true of our world. Calude’s model, by contrast, is (as far as I can tell) pulled out of thin air and justified by nothing. Anyway, I regard this incident as entirely, 100% my fault, and 0% Ariel’s. How was she to know that, while there are hundreds of knowledgeable quantum computing experts to interview, almost all of them are nice and polite? Anyway, this has led me to a revised policy: while I’ll still decline interviews, news organizations should feel free to run completed quantum computing pieces by me for quick fact checks.