- Hooray, I’m today’s “Featured ACM Member”! Which basically means, yet another interview with me about quantum computing, with questions including what’s most surprised me about the development of QC, and what students should do to get into the field.
- I’m proud to announce that An Automated Approach to the Collatz Conjecture, a paper by Emre Yolcu, myself, and Marijn Heule that we started working on over four years ago, is finally available on the arXiv, and will be presented at the 2021 Conference on Automated Deduction. Long story short: no, we didn’t prove Collatz, but we have an approach that can for the first time prove certain Collatz-like statements in a fully automated way, so hopefully that’s interesting! There was also a Quanta article even before our paper had come out (I wasn’t thrilled about the timing).
- The legendary Baba Brinkman has a new rap about quantum computing (hat tip to blog commenter YD). Having just watched the music video, I see it as one of the better popularization efforts our field has seen in the past 25 years—more coherent than the average journalistic account and with a much better backbeat. (I do, however, take a more guarded view than Brinkman of the potential applications, especially to e.g. autonomous driving and supply-chain optimization.)