So, the Templeton Foundation invited me to write a 1500-word essay on the above question. It’s like a blog post, except they pay me to do it! My essay is now live, here. I hope you enjoy my attempt at techno-futurist prose. You can comment on the essay either here or over at Templeton’s site. Thanks very much to Ansley Roan for commissioning the piece.
So, Part II of my two-part series for American Scientist magazine about how to recognize random numbers is now out. This part—whose original title was the one above, but was changed to “Quantum Randomness” to fit the allotted space—is all about quantum mechanics and the Bell inequality, and their use in generating “Einstein-certified random numbers.” I discuss the CHSH game, the Free Will Theorem, and Gerard ‘t Hooft’s “superdeterminism” (just a bit), before explaining the striking recent protocols of Colbeck, Pironio et al., Vazirani and Vidick, Couldron and Yuen, and Miller and Shi, all of which expand a short random seed into additional random bits that are “guaranteed to be random unless Nature resorted to faster-than-light communication to bias them.” I hope you like it.
[Update: See here for Hacker News thread]
In totally unrelated news, President Obama’s commencement speech at UC Irvine, about climate change and the people who still deny its reality, is worth reading.
Eight years ago, I put up a post entitled The Ten Most Annoying Questions in Quantum Computing. One of the ten wasn’t a real question—it was simply a request for readers to submit questions—so let’s call it nine. I’m delighted to say that, of the nine questions, six have by now been completely settled—most recently, my question about the parallel-repeated value of the CHSH game, which Andris Ambainis pointed out to me last week can be answered using a 2008 result of Barak et al. combined with a 2013 result of Dinur and Steurer.
To be clear, the demise of so many problems is exactly the outcome I wanted. In picking problems, my goal wasn’t to shock and awe with difficulty—as if to say “this is how smart I am, that whatever stumps me will also stump everyone else for decades.” Nor was it to showcase my bottomless profundity, by proffering questions so vague, multipartite, and open-ended that no matter what progress was made, I could always reply “ah, but you still haven’t addressed the real question!” Nor, finally, was my goal to list the biggest research directions for the entire field, the stuff everyone already knows about (“is there a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for graph isomorphism?”). My interest was exclusively in “little” questions, in weird puzzles that looked (at least at the time) like there was no deep obstruction to just killing them one by one, whichever way their answers turned out. What made them annoying was that they hadn’t succumbed already.
So, now that two-thirds of my problems have met the fate they deserved, at Andris’s suggestion I’m presenting a new list of Ten Most Annoying Questions in Quantum Computing—a list that starts with the three still-unanswered questions from the old list, and then adds seven more.
But we’ll get to that shortly. First, let’s review the six questions that have been answered.
CLOSED, NO-LONGER ANNOYING QUESTIONS IN QUANTUM COMPUTING
1. Given an n-qubit pure state, is there always a way to apply Hadamard gates to some subset of the qubits, so as to make all 2n computational basis states have nonzero amplitudes? Positive answer by Ashley Montanaro and Dan Shepherd, posted to this blog in 2006.
3. Can any QMA(2) (QMA with two unentangled yes-provers) protocol be amplified to exponentially small error probability? Positive answer by Aram Harrow and Ashley Montanaro, from a FOCS’2010 paper.
4. If a unitary operation U can be applied in polynomial time, then can some square root of U also be applied in polynomial time? Positive answer by Lana Sheridan, Dmitri Maslov, and Michele Mosca, from a 2008 paper.
5. Suppose Alice and Bob are playing n parallel CHSH games, with no communication or entanglement. Is the probability that they’ll win all n games at most pn, for some p bounded below 0.853?
OK, let me relay what Andris Ambainis told me about this question, with Andris’s kind permission. First of all, we’ve known for a while that the optimal success probability is not the (3/4)n that Alice and Bob could trivially achieve by just playing all n games separately. I observed in 2006 that, by correlating their strategies between pairs of games in a clever way, Alice and Bob can win with probability (√10 / 4)n ~ 0.79n. And Barak et al. showed in 2008 that they can win with probability ((1+√5)/4)n ~ 0.81n. (Unfortunately, I don’t know the actual strategy that achieves the latter bound! Barak et al. say they’ll describe it in the full version of their paper, but the full version hasn’t yet appeared.)
Anyway, Dinur-Steurer 2013 gave a general recipe to prove that the value of a repeated projection game is at most αn, where α is some constant that depends on the game in question. When Andris followed their recipe for the CHSH game, he obtained the result α=(1+√5)/4—thereby showing that Barak et al.’s strategy, whatever it is, is precisely optimal! Andris also observes that, for any two-prover game G, the Dinur-Steurer bound α(G) is always strictly less than the entangled value ω*(G), unless the classical and entangled values are the same for one copy of the game (i.e., unless ω(G)=ω*(G)). This implies that parallel repetition can never completely eliminate a quantum advantage.
6. Forget about an oracle relative to which BQP is not in PH (the Polynomial Hierarchy). Forget about an oracle relative to which BQP is not in AM (Arthur-Merlin). Is there an oracle relative to which BQP is not in SZK (Statistical Zero-Knowledge)? Positive answer by me, posted to this blog in 2006. See also my BQP vs. PH paper for a different proof.
9. Is there an n-qubit pure state that can be prepared by a circuit of size n3, and that can’t be distinguished from the maximally mixed state by any circuit of size n2? A positive answer follows from this 2009 paper by Richard Low—thanks very much to Fernando Brandao for bringing that to my attention a few months ago.
OK, now on to:
THE NEW TEN MOST ANNOYING QUESTIONS IN QUANTUM COMPUTING
1. Can we get any upper bound whatsoever on the complexity class QMIP—i.e., quantum multi-prover interactive proofs with unlimited prior entanglement? (Since I asked this question in 2006, Ito and Vidick achieved the breakthrough lower bound NEXP⊆QMIP, but there’s been basically no progress on the upper bound side.)
2. Given any n-qubit unitary operation U, does there exist an oracle relative to which U can be (approximately) applied in polynomial time? (Since 2006, my interest in this question has only increased. See this paper by me and Greg Kuperberg for background and related results.)
3. How many mutually unbiased bases are there in non-prime-power dimensions?
4. Since Chris Fuchs was so thrilled by my including one of his favorite questions on my earlier list (question #3 above), let me add another of his favorites: do SIC-POVMs exist in arbitrary finite dimensions?
5. Is there a Boolean function f:{0,1}n→{0,1} whose bounded-error quantum query complexity is strictly greater than n/2? (Thanks to Shelby Kimmel for this question! Note that this paper by van Dam shows that the bounded-error quantum query complexity never exceeds n/2+O(√n), while this paper by Ambainis et al. shows that it’s at least n/2-O(√n) for almost all Boolean functions f.)
6. Is there a “universal disentangler”: that is, a superoperator S that takes nO(1) qubits as input; that produces a 2n-qubit bipartite state (with n qubits on each side) as output; whose output S(ρ) is always close in variation distance to a separable state; and that given an appropriate input state, can produce as output an approximation to any desired separable state? (See here for background about this problem, originally posed by John Watrous. Note that if such an S existed and were computationally efficient, it would imply QMA=QMA(2).)
7. Suppose we have explicit descriptions of n two-outcome POVM measurements—say, as d×d Hermitian matrices E1,…,En—and are also given k=(log(nd))O(1) copies of an unknown quantum state ρ in d dimensions. Is there a way to measure the copies so as to estimate the n expectation values Tr(E1ρ),…,Tr(Enρ), each to constant additive error? (A forthcoming paper of mine on private-key quantum money will contain some background and related results.)
8. Is there a collection of 1- and 2-qubit gates that generates a group of unitary matrices that is (a) not universal for quantum computation, (b) not just conjugate to permuted diagonal matrices or one-qubit gates plus swaps, and (c) not conjugate to a subgroup of the Clifford group?
9. Given a partial Boolean function f:S→{0,1} with S⊆{0,1}n, is the bounded-error quantum query complexity of f always polynomially related to the smallest degree of any polynomial p:{0,1}n→R such that (a) p(x)∈[0,1] for all x∈{0,1}n, and (b) |p(x)-f(x)|≤1/3 for all x∈S?
10. Is there a quantum finite automaton that reads in an infinite sequence of i.i.d. coin flips, and whose limiting probability of being found in an “accept” state is at least 2/3 if the coin is fair and at most 1/3 if the coin is unfair? (See this paper by me and Andy Drucker for background and related results.)
So I’ve written an article about the above question for PBS’s website—a sort of tl;dr version of my 2005 survey paper NP-Complete Problems and Physical Reality, but updated with new material about the simulation of quantum field theories and about AdS/CFT. Go over there, read the article (it’s free), then come back here to talk about it if you like. Thanks so much to Kate Becker for commissioning the article.
In other news, there’s a profile of me at MIT News (called “The Complexonaut”) that some people might find amusing.
Oh, and anyone who thinks the main reason to care about quantum computing is that, if our civilization ever manages to surmount the profound scientific and technological obstacles to building a scalable quantum computer, then that little padlock icon on your web browser would no longer represent ironclad security? Ha ha. Yeah, it turns out that, besides factoring integers, you can also break OpenSSL by (for example) exploiting a memory bug in C. The main reason to care about quantum computing is, and has always been, science.
Update (April 5): By now, three or four people have written in asking for my reaction to the preprint “Computational solution to quantum foundational problems” by Arkady Bolotin. (See here for the inevitable Slashdot discussion, entitled “P vs. NP Problem Linked to the Quantum Nature of the Universe.”) It gives me no pleasure to respond to this sort of thing—it would be far better to let papers this gobsmackingly uninformed about the relevant issues fade away in quiet obscurity—but since that no longer seems to be possible in the age of social media, my brief response is here.
(note: sorry, no April Fools post, just a post that happens to have gone up on April Fools)
This weekend, Dana and I celebrated our third anniversary by going out to your typical sappy romantic movie: Particle Fever, a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider. As it turns out, the movie was spectacularly good; anyone who reads this blog should go see it. Or, to offer even higher praise:
If watching Particle Fever doesn’t cause you to feel in your bones the value of fundamental science—the thrill of discovery, unmotivated by any application—then you are not truly human. You are a barnyard animal who happens to walk on its hind legs.
Indeed, I regard Particle Fever as one of the finest advertisements for science itself ever created. It’s effective precisely because it doesn’t try to tell you why science is important (except for one scene, where an economist asks a physicist after a public talk about the “return on investment” of the LHC, and is given the standard correct answer, about “what was the return on investment of radio waves when they were first discovered?”). Instead, the movie simply shows you the lives of particle physicists, of people who take for granted the urgency of knowing the truth about the basic constituents of reality. And in showing you the scientists’ quest, it makes you feel as they feel. Incidentally, the movie also shows footage of Congressmen ridiculing the uselessness of the Superconducting Supercollider, during the debates that led to the SSC’s cancellation. So, gently, implicitly, you’re invited to choose: whose side are you on?
I do have a few, not quite criticisms of the movie, but points that any viewer should bear in mind while watching it.
First, it’s important not to come away with the impression that Particle Fever shows “what science is usually like.” Sure, there are plenty of scenes that any scientist would find familiar: sleep-deprived postdocs; boisterous theorists correcting each other’s statements over Chinese food; a harried lab manager walking to the office oblivious to traffic. On the other hand, the decades-long quest to find the Higgs boson, the agonizing drought of new data before the one big money shot, the need for an entire field to coalesce around a single machine, the whole careers hitched to specific speculative scenarios that this one machine could favor or disfavor—all of that is a profoundly abnormal situation in the history of science. Particle physics didn’t used to be that way, and other parts of science are not that way today. Of course, the fact that particle physics became that way makes it unusually suited for a suspenseful movie—a fact that the creators of Particle Fever understood perfectly and exploited to the hilt.
Second, the movie frames the importance of the Higgs search as follows: if the Higgs boson turned out to be relatively light, like 115 GeV, then that would favor supersymmetry, and hence an “elegant, orderly universe.” If, on the other hand, the Higgs turned out to be relatively heavy, like 140 GeV, then that would favor anthropic multiverse scenarios (and hence a “messy, random universe”). So the fact that the Higgs ended up being 125 GeV means the universe is coyly refusing to tell us whether it’s orderly or random, and more research is needed.
In my view, it’s entirely appropriate for a movie like this one to relate its subject matter to big, metaphysical questions, to the kinds of questions anyone can get curious about (in contrast to, say, “what is the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking?”) and that the scientists themselves talk about anyway. But caution is needed here. My lay understanding, which might be wrong, is as follows: while it’s true that a lighter Higgs would tend to favor supersymmetric models, the only way to argue that a heavier Higgs would “favor the multiverse,” is if you believe that a multiverse is automatically favored by a lack of better explanations. More broadly, I wish the film had made clearer that the explanation for (some) apparent “fine-tunings” in the Standard Model might be neither supersymmetry, nor the multiverse, nor “it’s just an inexplicable accident,” but simply some other explanation that no one has thought of yet, but that would emerge from a better understanding of quantum field theory. As one example, on reading up on the subject after watching the film, I was surprised to learn that a very conservative-sounding idea—that of “asymptotically safe gravity”—was used in 2009 to predict the Higgs mass right on the nose, at 126.3 ± 2.2 GeV. Of course, it’s possible that this was just a lucky guess (there were, after all, lots of Higgs mass predictions). But as an outsider, I’d love to understand why possibilities like this don’t seem to get discussed more (there might, of course, be perfectly good reasons that I don’t know).
Third, for understandable dramatic reasons, the movie focuses almost entirely on the “younger generation,” from postdocs working on ATLAS and CMS detectors, to theorists like Nima Arkani-Hamed who are excited about the LHC because of its ability to test scenarios like supersymmetry. From the movie’s perspective, the creation of the Standard Model itself, in the 60s and 70s, might as well be ancient history. Indeed, when Peter Higgs finally appears near the end of the film, it’s as if Isaac Newton has walked onstage. At several points, I found myself wishing that some of the original architects of the Standard Model, like Steven Weinberg or Sheldon Glashow, had been interviewed to provide their perspectives. After all, their model is really the one that’s been vindicated at the LHC, not (so far) any of the newer ideas like supersymmetry or large extra dimensions.
OK, but let me come to the main point of this post. I confess that my overwhelming emotion on watching Particle Fever was one of regret—regret that my own field, quantum computing, has never managed to make the case for itself the way particle physics and cosmology have, in terms of the human urge to explore the unknown.
See, from my perspective, there’s a lot to envy about the high-energy physicists. Most importantly, they don’t perceive any need to justify what they do in terms of practical applications. Sure, they happily point to “spinoffs,” like the fact that the Web was invented at CERN. But any time they try to justify what they do, the unstated message is that if you don’t see the inherent value of understanding the universe, then the problem lies with you.
Now, no marketing consultant would ever in a trillion years endorse such an out-of-touch, elitist sales pitch. But the remarkable fact is that the message has more-or-less worked. While the cancellation of the SSC was a setback, the high-energy physicists did succeed in persuading the world to pony up the $11 billion needed to build the LHC, and to gain the information that the mass of the Higgs boson is about 125 GeV.
Now contrast that with quantum computing. To hear the media tell it, a quantum computer would be a powerful new gizmo, sort of like existing computers except faster. (Why would it be faster? Something to do with trying both 0 and 1 at the same time.) The reasons to build quantum computers are things that could make any buzzword-spouting dullard nod in recognition: cracking uncrackable encryption, finding bugs in aviation software, sifting through massive data sets, maybe even curing cancer, predicting the weather, or finding aliens. And all of this could be yours in a few short years—or some say it’s even commercially available today. So, if you check back in a few years and it’s still not on store shelves, probably it went the way of flying cars or moving sidewalks: another technological marvel that just failed to materialize for some reason.
Foolishly, shortsightedly, many academics in quantum computing have played along with this stunted vision of their field—because saying this sort of thing is the easiest way to get funding, because everyone else says the same stuff, and because after you’ve repeated something on enough grant applications you start to believe it yourself. All in all, then, it’s just easier to go along with the “gizmo vision” of quantum computing than to ask pointed questions like:
What happens when it turns out that some of the most-hyped applications of quantum computers (e.g., optimization, machine learning, and Big Data) were based on wildly inflated hopes—that there simply isn’t much quantum speedup to be had for typical problems of that kind, that yes, quantum algorithms exist, but they aren’t much faster than the best classical randomized algorithms? What happens when it turns out that the real applications of quantum computing—like breaking RSA and simulating quantum systems—are nice, but not important enough by themselves to justify the cost? (E.g., when the imminent risk of a quantum computer simply causes people to switch from RSA to other cryptographic codes? Or when the large polynomial overheads of quantum simulation algorithms limit their usefulness?) Finally, what happens when it turns out that the promises of useful quantum computers in 5-10 years were wildly unrealistic?
I’ll tell you: when this happens, the spigots of funding that once flowed freely will dry up, and the techno-journalists and pointy-haired bosses who once sang our praises will turn to the next craze. And they’re unlikely to be impressed when we protest, “no, look, the reasons we told you before for why you should support quantum computing were never the real reasons! and the real reasons remain as valid as ever!”
In my view, we as a community have failed to make the honest case for quantum computing—the case based on basic science—because we’ve underestimated the public. We’ve falsely believed that people would never support us if we told them the truth: that while the potential applications are wonderful cherries on the sundae, they’re not and have never been the main reason to build a quantum computer. The main reason is that we want to make absolutely manifest what quantum mechanics says about the nature of reality. We want to lift the enormity of Hilbert space out of the textbooks, and rub its full, linear, unmodified truth in the face of anyone who denies it. Or if it isn’t the truth, then we want to discover what is the truth.
Many people would say it’s impossible to make the latter pitch, that funders and laypeople would never understand it or buy it. But there’s an $11-billion, 17-mile ring under Geneva that speaks against their cynicism.
Anyway, let me end this “movie review” with an anecdote. The other day a respected colleague of mine—someone who doesn’t normally follow such matters—asked me what I thought about D-Wave. After I’d given my usual spiel, he smiled and said:
“See Scott, but you could imagine scientists of the 1400s saying the same things about Columbus! He had no plan that could survive academic scrutiny. He raised money under the false belief that he could reach India by sailing due west. And he didn’t understand what he’d found even after he’d found it. Yet for all that, it was Columbus, and not some academic critic on the sidelines, who discovered the new world.”
With this one analogy, my colleague had eloquently summarized the case for D-Wave, a case often leveled against me much more verbosely. But I had an answer.
“I accept your analogy!” I replied. “But to me, Columbus and the other conquerors of the Americas weren’t heroes to be admired or emulated. Motivated by gold and spices rather than knowledge, they spread disease, killed and enslaved millions in one of history’s greatest holocausts, and burned the priceless records of the Maya and Inca civilizations so that the world would never even understand what was lost. I submit that, had it been undertaken by curious and careful scientists—or at least people with a scientific mindset—rather than by swashbucklers funded by greedy kings, the European exploration and colonization of the Americas could have been incalculably less tragic.”
The trouble is, when I say things like that, people just laugh at me knowingly. There he goes again, the pie-in-the-sky complexity theorist, who has no idea what it takes to get anything done in the real world. What an amusingly contrary perspective he has.
And that, in the end, is why I think Particle Fever is such an important movie. Through the stories of the people who built the LHC, you’ll see how it really is possible to reach a new continent without the promise of gold or the allure of lies.
Most of the time, I’m a crabby, cantankerous ogre, whose only real passion in life is using this blog to shoot down the wrong ideas of others. But alas, try as I might to maintain my reputation as a pure bundle of seething negativity, sometimes events transpire that pierce my crusty exterior. Maybe it’s because I’m in Berkeley now, visiting the new Simons Institute for Theory of Computing during its special semester on Hamiltonian complexity. And it’s tough to keep up my acerbic East Coast skepticism of everything new in the face of all this friggin’ sunshine. (Speaking of which, if you’re in the Bay Area and wanted to meet me, this week’s the week! Email me.) Or maybe it’s watching Lily running around, her face wide with wonder. If she’s so excited by her discovery of (say) a toilet plunger or some lint on the floor, what right do I have not to be excited by actual scientific progress?
Which brings me to the third reason for my relatively-sunny disposition: two long and fascinating recent papers on the arXiv. What these papers have in common is that they use concepts from theoretical computer science in unexpected ways, while trying to address open problems at the heart of “traditional, continuous” physics and math. One paper uses quantum circuit complexity to help understand black holes; the other uses fault-tolerant universal computation to help understand the Navier-Stokes equations.
Recently, our always-pleasant string-theorist friend Luboš Motl described computational complexity theorists as “extraordinarily naïve” (earlier, he also called us “deluded” and “bigoted”). Why? Because we’re obsessed with “arbitrary, manmade” concepts like the set of problems solvable in polynomial time, and especially because we assume things we haven’t yet proved such as P≠NP. (Jokes about throwing stones from a glass house—or a stringy house—are left as exercises for the reader.) The two papers that I want to discuss today reflect a different perspective: one that regards computation as no more “arbitrary” than other central concepts of mathematics, and indeed, as something that shows up even in contexts that seem incredibly remote from it, from the AdS/CFT correspondence to turbulent fluid flow.
Our first paper is Computational Complexity and Black Hole Horizons, by Lenny Susskind. As readers of this blog might recall, last year Daniel Harlow and Patrick Hayden made a striking connection between computational complexity and the black-hole “firewall” question, by giving complexity-theoretic evidence that performing the measurement of Hawking radiation required for the AMPS experiment would require an exponentially-long quantum computation. In his new work, Susskind makes a different, and in some ways even stranger, connection between complexity and firewalls. Specifically, given an n-qubit pure state |ψ〉, recall that the quantum circuit complexity of |ψ〉 is the minimum number of 2-qubit gates needed to prepare |ψ〉 starting from the all-|0〉 state. Then for reasons related to black holes and firewalls, Susskind wants to use the quantum circuit complexity of |ψ〉 as an intrinsic clock, to measure how long |ψ〉 has been evolving for. Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting Stanford, where Lenny spent several hours explaining this stuff to me. I still don’t fully understand it, but since it’s arguable that no one (including Lenny himself) does, let me give it a shot.
My approach will be to divide into two questions. The first question is: why, in general (i.e., forgetting about black holes), might one want to use quantum circuit complexity as a clock? Here the answer is: because unlike most other clocks, this one should continue to tick for an exponentially long time!
Consider some standard, classical thermodynamic system, like a box filled with gas, with the gas all initially concentrated in one corner. Over time, the gas will diffuse across the box, in accord with the Second Law, until it completely equilibrates. Furthermore, if we know the laws of physics, then we can calculate exactly how fast this diffusion will happen. But this implies that we can use the box as a clock! To do so, we’d simply have to measure how diffused the gas was, then work backwards to determine how much time had elapsed since the gas started diffusing.
But notice that this “clock” only works until the gas reaches equilibrium—i.e., is equally spread across the box. Once the gas gets to equilibrium, which it does in a reasonably short time, it just stays there (at least until the next Poincaré recurrence time). So, if you see the box in equilibrium, there’s no measurement you could make—or certainly no “practical” measurement—that would tell you how long it’s been there. Indeed, if we model the collisions between gas particles (and between gas particles and the walls of the box) as random events, then something even stronger is true. Namely, the probability distribution over all possible configurations of the gas particles will quickly converge to an equilibrium distribution. And if you all you knew was that the particles were in the equilibrium distribution, then there’s no property of their distribution that you could point to—not even an abstract, unmeasurable property—such that knowing that property would tell you how long the gas had been in equilibrium.
Interestingly, something very different happens if we consider a quantum pure state, in complete isolation from its environment. If you have some quantum particles in a perfectly-isolating box, and you start them out in a “simple” state (say, with all particles unentangled and in a corner), then they too will appear to diffuse, with their wavefunctions spreading out and getting entangled with each other, until the system reaches “equilibrium.” After that, there will once again be no “simple” measurement you can make—say, of the density of particles in some particular location—that will give you any idea of how long the box has been in equilibrium. On the other hand, the laws of unitary evolution assure us that the quantum state is still evolving, rotating serenely through Hilbert space, just like it was before equilibration! Indeed, in principle you could even measure that the evolution was still happening, but to do so, you’d need to perform an absurdly precise and complicated measurement—one that basically inverted the entire unitary transformation that had been applied since the particles started diffusing.
Lenny now asks the question: if the quantum state of the particles continues to evolve even after “equilibration,” then what physical quantity can we point to as continuing to increase? By the argument above, it can’t be anything simple that physicists are used to talking about, like coarse-grained entropy. Indeed, the most obvious candidate that springs to mind, for a quantity that should keep increasing even after equilibration, is just the quantum circuit complexity of the state! If there’s no “magic shortcut” to simulating this system—that is, if the fastest way to learn the quantum state at time T is just to run the evolution equations forward for T time steps—then the quantum circuit complexity will continue to increase linearly with T, long after equilibration. Eventually, the complexity will “max out” at ~cn, where n is the number of particles, simply because (neglecting small multiplicative terms) the dimension of the Hilbert space is always an upper bound on the circuit complexity. After even longer amounts of time—like ~cc^n—the circuit complexity will dip back down (sometimes even to 0), as the quantum state undergoes recurrences. But both of those effects only occur on timescales ridiculously longer than anything normally relevant to physics or everyday life.
Admittedly, given the current status of complexity theory, there’s little hope of proving unconditionally that the quantum circuit complexity continues to rise until it becomes exponential, when some time-independent Hamiltonian is continuously applied to the all-|0〉 state. (If we could prove such a statement, then presumably we could also prove PSPACE⊄BQP/poly.) But maybe we could prove such a statement modulo a reasonable conjecture. And we do have suggestive weaker results. In particular (and as I just learned this Friday), in 2012 Brandão, Harrow, and Horodecki, building on earlier work due to Low, showed that, if you apply S>>n random two-qubit gates to n qubits initially in the all-|0〉 state, then with high probability, not only do you get a state with large circuit complexity, you get a state that can’t even be distinguished from the maximally mixed state by any quantum circuit with at most ~S1/6 gates.
OK, now on to the second question: what does any of this have to do with black holes? The connection Lenny wants to make involves the AdS/CFT correspondence, the “duality” between two completely different-looking theories that’s been the rage in string theory since the late 1990s. On one side of the ring is AdS (Anti de Sitter), a quantum-gravitational theory in D spacetime dimensions—one where black holes can form and evaporate, etc., but on the other hand, the entire universe is surrounded by a reflecting boundary a finite distance away, to help keep everything nice and unitary. On the other side is CFT (Conformal Field Theory): an “ordinary” quantum field theory, with no gravity, that lives only on the (D-1)-dimensional “boundary” of the AdS space, and not in its interior “bulk.” The claim of AdS/CFT is that despite how different they look, these two theories are “equivalent,” in the sense that any calculation in one theory can be transformed to a calculation in the other theory that yields the same answer. Moreover, we get mileage this way, since a calculation that’s hard on the AdS side is often easy on the CFT side and vice versa.
As an example, suppose we’re interested in what happens inside a black hole—say, because we want to investigate the AMPS firewall paradox. Now, figuring out what happens inside a black hole (or even on or near the event horizon) is a notoriously hard problem in quantum gravity; that’s why people have been arguing about firewalls for the past two years, and about the black hole information problem for the past forty! But what if we could put our black hole in an AdS box? Then using AdS/CFT, couldn’t we translate questions about the black-hole interior to questions about the CFT on the boundary, which don’t involve gravity and which would therefore hopefully be easier to answer?
In fact people have tried to do that—but frustratingly, they haven’t been able to use the CFT calculations to answer even the grossest, most basic questions about what someone falling into the black hole would actually experience. (For example, would that person hit a “firewall” and die immediately at the horizon, or would she continue smoothly through, only dying close to the singularity?) Lenny’s paper explores a possible reason for this failure. It turns out that the way AdS/CFT works, the closer to the black hole’s event horizon you want to know what happens, the longer you need to time-evolve the quantum state of the CFT to find out. In particular, if you want to know what’s going on at distance ε from the event horizon, then you need to run the CFT for an amount of time that grows like log(1/ε). And what if you want to know what’s going on inside the black hole? In line with the holographic principle, it turns out that you can express an observable inside the horizon by an integral over the entire AdS space outside the horizon. Now, that integral will include a part where the distance ε from the event horizon goes to 0—so log(1/ε), and hence the complexity of the CFT calculation that you have to do, diverges to infinity. For some kinds of calculations, the ε→0 part of the integral isn’t very important, and can be neglected at the cost of only a small error. For other kinds of calculations, unfortunately—and in particular, for the kind that would tell you whether or not there’s a firewall—the ε→0 part is extremely important, and it makes the CFT calculation hopelessly intractable.
Note that yes, we even need to continue the integration for ε much smaller than the Planck length—i.e., for so-called “transplanckian” distances! As Lenny puts it, however:
For most of this vast sub-planckian range of scales we don’t expect that the operational meaning has anything to do with meter sticks … It has more to do with large times than small distances.
One could give this transplanckian blowup in computational complexity a pessimistic spin: darn, so it’s probably hopeless to use AdS/CFT to prove once and for all that there are no firewalls! But there’s also a more positive interpretation: the interior of a black hole is “protected from meddling” by a thick armor of computational complexity. To explain this requires a digression about firewalls.
The original firewall paradox of AMPS could be phrased as follows: if you performed a certain weird, complicated measurement on the Hawking radiation emitted from a “sufficiently old” black hole, then the expected results of that measurement would be incompatible with also seeing a smooth, Einsteinian spacetime if you later jumped into the black hole to see what was there. (Technically, because you’d violate the monogamy of entanglement.) If what awaited you behind the event horizon wasn’t a “classical” black hole interior with a singularity in the middle, but an immediate breakdown of spacetime, then one says you would’ve “hit a firewall.”
Yes, it seems preposterous that “firewalls” would exist: at the least, it would fly in the face of everything people thought they understood for decades about general relativity and quantum field theory. But crucially—and here I have to disagree with Stephen Hawking—one can’t “solve” this problem by simply repeating the physical absurdities of firewalls, or by constructing scenarios where firewalls “self-evidently” don’t arise. Instead, as I see it, solving the problem means giving an account of what actually happens when you do the AMPS experiment, or of what goes wrong when you try to do it.
On this last question, it seems to me that Susskind and Juan Maldacena achieved a major advance in their much-discussed ER=EPR paper last year. Namely, they presented a picture where, sure, a firewall arises (at least temporarily) if you do the AMPS experiment—but no firewall arises if you don’t do the experiment! In other words, doing the experiment sends a nonlocal signal to the interior of the black hole (though you do have to jump into the black hole to receive the signal, so causality outside the black hole is still preserved). Now, how is it possible for your measurement of the Hawking radiation to send an instantaneous signal to the black hole interior, which might be light-years away from you when you measure? On Susskind and Maldacena’s account, it’s possible because the entanglement between the Hawking radiation and the degrees of freedom still in the black hole, can be interpreted as creating wormholes between the two. Under ordinary conditions, these wormholes (like most wormholes in general relativity) are “non-traversable”: they “pinch off” if you try to send signals through them, so they can’t be used for faster-than-light communication. However, if you did the AMPS experiment, then the wormholes would become traversable, and could carry a firewall (or an innocuous happy-birthday message, or whatever) from the Hawking radiation to the black hole interior. (Incidentally, ER stands for Einstein and Rosen, who wrote a famous paper on wormholes, while EPR stands for Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, who wrote a famous paper on entanglement. “ER=EPR” is Susskind and Maldacena’s shorthand for their proposed connection between wormholes and entanglement.)
Anyway, these heady ideas raise an obvious question: how hard would it be to do the AMPS experiment? Is sending a nonlocal signal to the interior of a black hole via that experiment actually a realistic possibility? In their work a year ago on computational complexity and firewalls, Harlow and Hayden already addressed that question, though from a different perspective than Susskind. In particular, Harlow and Hayden gave strong evidence that carrying out the AMPS experiment would require solving a problem believed to be exponentially hard even for a quantum computer: specifically, a complete problem for QSZK (Quantum Statistical Zero Knowledge). In followup work (not yet written up, though see my talk at KITP and my PowerPoint slides), I showed that the Harlow-Hayden problem is actually at least as hard as inverting one-way functions, which is even stronger evidence for hardness.
All of this suggests that, even supposing we could surround an astrophysical black hole with a giant array of perfect photodetectors, wait ~1069 years for the black hole to (mostly) evaporate, then route the Hawking photons into a super-powerful, fault-tolerant quantum computer, doing the AMPS experiment (and hence, creating traversable wormholes to the black hole interior) still wouldn’t be a realistic prospect, even if the equations formally allow it! There’s no way to sugarcoat this: computational complexity limitations seem to be the only thing protecting the geometry of spacetime from nefarious experimenters.
Anyway, Susskind takes that amazing observation of Harlow and Hayden as a starting point, but then goes off on a different tack. For one thing, he isn’t focused on the AMPS experiment (the one involving monogamy of entanglement) specifically: he just wants to know how hard it is to do any experiment (possibly a different one) that would send nonlocal signals to the black hole interior. For another, unlike Harlow and Hayden, Susskind isn’t trying to show that such an experiment would be exponentially hard. Instead, he’s content if the experiment is “merely” polynomially hard—but in the same sense that (say) unscrambling an egg, or recovering a burned book from the smoke and ash, are polynomially hard. In other words, Susskind only wants to argue that creating a traversable wormhole would be “thermodynamics-complete.” A third, related, difference is that Susskind considers an extremely special model scenario: namely, the AdS/CFT description of something called the “thermofield double state.” (This state involves two entangled black holes in otherwise-separated spacetimes; according to ER=EPR, we can think of those black holes as being connected by a wormhole.) While I don’t yet understand this point, apparently the thermofield double state is much more favorable for firewall production than a “realistic” spacetime—and in particular, the Harlow-Hayden argument doesn’t apply to it. Susskind wants to show that even so (i.e., despite how “easy” we’ve made it), sending a signal through the wormhole connecting the two black holes of the thermofield double state would still require solving a thermodynamics-complete problem.
So that’s the setup. What new insights does Lenny get? This, finally, is where we circle back to the view of quantum circuit complexity as a clock. Briefly, Lenny finds that the quantum state getting more and more complicated in the CFT description—i.e., its quantum circuit complexity going up and up—directly corresponds to the wormhole getting longer and longer in the AdS description. (Indeed, the length of the wormhole increases linearly with time, growing like the circuit complexity divided by the total number of qubits.) And the wormhole getting longer and longer is what makes it non-traversable—i.e., what makes it impossible to send a signal through.
Why has quantum circuit complexity made a sudden appearance here? Because in the CFT description, the circuit complexity continuing to increase is the only thing that’s obviously “happening”! From a conventional physics standpoint, the quantum state of the CFT very quickly reaches equilibrium and then just stays there. If you measured some “conventional” physical observable—say, the energy density at a particular point—then it wouldn’t look like the CFT state was continuing to evolve at all. And yet we know that the CFT state is evolving, for two extremely different reasons. Firstly, because (as we discussed early on in this post) unitary evolution is still happening, so presumably the state’s quantum circuit complexity is continuing to increase. And secondly, because in the dual AdS description, the wormhole is continuing to get longer!
From this connection, at least three striking conclusions follow:
I’ll leave you with a question of my own about this complexity / black hole connection: one that I’m unsure how to think about, but that perhaps interests me more than any other here. My question is: could you ever learn the answer to an otherwise-intractable computational problem by jumping into a black hole? Of course, you’d have to really want the answer—so much so that you wouldn’t mind dying moments after learning it, or not being able to share it with anyone else! But never mind that. What I have in mind is first applying some polynomial-size quantum circuit to the Hawking radiation, then jumping into the black hole to see what nonlocal effect (if any) the circuit had on the interior. The fact that the mapping between interior and exterior states is so complicated suggests that there might be complexity-theoretic mileage to be had this way, but I don’t know what. (It’s also possible that you can get a computational speedup in special cases like the thermofield double state, but that a Harlow-Hayden-like obstruction prevents you from getting one with real astrophysical black holes. I.e., that for real black holes, you’ll just see a smooth, boring, Einsteinian black hole interior no matter what polynomial-size quantum circuit you applied to the Hawking radiation.)
If you’re still here, the second paper I want to discuss today is Finite-time blowup for an averaged three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation by Terry Tao. (See also the excellent Quanta article by Erica Klarreich.) I’ll have much, much less to say about this paper than I did about Susskind’s, but that’s not because it’s less interesting: it’s only because I understand the issues even less well.
Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness is one of the seven Clay Millennium Problems (alongside P vs. NP, the Riemann Hypothesis, etc). The problem asks whether the standard, classical differential equations for three-dimensional fluid flow are well-behaved, in the sense of not “blowing up” (e.g., concentrating infinite energy on a single point) after a finite amount of time.
Expanding on ideas from his earlier blog posts and papers about Navier-Stokes (see here for the gentlest of them), Tao argues that the Navier-Stokes problem is closely related to the question of whether or not it’s possible to “build a fault-tolerant universal computer out of water.” Why? Well, it’s not the computational universality per se that matters, but if you could use fluid flow to construct general enough computing elements—resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc.—then you could use those elements to recursively shift the energy in a given region into a region half the size, and from there to a region a quarter the size, and so on, faster and faster, until you got infinite energy density after a finite amount of time.
Strikingly, building on an earlier construction by Katz and Pavlovic, Tao shows that this is actually possible for an “averaged” version of the Navier-Stokes equations! So at the least, any proof of existence and smoothness for the real Navier-Stokes equations will need to “notice” the difference between the real and averaged versions. In his paper, though, Tao hints at the possibility (or dare one say likelihood?) that the truth might go the other way. That is, maybe the “universal computer” construction can be ported from the averaged Navier-Stokes equations to the real ones. In that case, we’d have blowup in finite time for the real equations, and a negative solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. Of course, such a result wouldn’t imply that real, physical water was in any danger of “blowing up”! It would simply mean that the discrete nature of water (i.e., the fact that it’s made of H2O molecules, rather than being infinitely divisible) was essential to understanding its stability given arbitrary initial conditions.
So, what are the prospects for such a blowup result? Let me quote from Tao’s paper:
One minor point that I’d love to understand is, what happens in two dimensions? Existence and smoothness are known to hold for the 2-dimensional analogues of the Navier-Stokes equations. If they also held for the averaged 2-dimensional equations, then it would follow that Tao’s “universal computer” must be making essential use of the third dimension. How? If I knew the answer to that, then I’d feel for the first time like I had some visual crutch for understanding why 3-dimensional fluid flow is so complicated, even though 2-dimensional fluid flow isn’t.
I see that, in blog comments here and here, Tao says that the crucial difference between the 2- and 3-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations arises from the different scaling behavior of the dissipation term: basically, you can ignore it in 3 or more dimensions, but you can’t ignore it in 2. But maybe there’s a more doofus-friendly explanation, which would start with some 3-dimensional fluid logic gate, and then explain why the gate has no natural 2-dimensional analogue, or why dissipation causes its analogue to fail.
Obviously, there’s much more to say about both papers (especially the second…) than I said in this post, and many people more knowledgeable than I am to say those things. But that’s what the comments section is for. Right now I’m going outside to enjoy the California sunshine.
You might recall that Shin, Smith, Smolin, and Vazirani posted a widely-discussed preprint a week ago, questioning the evidence for large-scale quantum behavior in the D-Wave machine. Geordie Rose responded here. Tonight, in a Shtetl-Optimized exclusive scoop, I bring you Umesh Vazirani’s response to Geordie’s comments. Without further ado:
Even a cursory reading of our paper will reveal that Geordie Rose is attacking a straw man. Let me quickly outline the main point of our paper and the irrelevance of Rose’s comments:
To date the Boixo et al paper was the only serious evidence in favor of large scale quantum behavior by the D-Wave machine. We investigated their claims and showed that there are serious problems with their conclusions. Their conclusions were based on the close agreement between the input-output data from D-Wave and quantum simulated annealing, and their inability despite considerable effort to find any classical model that agreed with the input-output data. In our paper, we gave a very simple classical model of interacting magnets that closely agreed with the input-output data. We stated that our results implied that “it is premature to conclude that D-Wave machine exhibits large scale quantum behavior”.
Rose attacks our paper for claiming that “D-Wave processors are inherently classical, and can be described by a classical model with no need to invoke quantum mechanics.” A reading of our paper will make it perfectly clear that this is not a claim that we make. We state explicitly “It is worth emphasizing that the goal of this paper is not to provide a classical model for the D-Wave machine, … The classical model introduced here is useful for the purposes of studying the large-scale algorithmic features of the D-Wave machine. The task of finding an accurate model for the D-Wave machine (classical, quantum or otherwise), would be better pursued with direct access, not only to programming the D-Wave machine, but also to its actual hardware.”
Rose goes on to point to a large number of experiments conducted by D-Wave to prove small scale entanglement over 2-8 qubits and criticizes our paper for not trying to model those aspects of D-Wave. But such small scale entanglement properties are not directly relevant to prospects for a quantum speedup. Therefore we were specifically interested in claims about the large scale quantum behavior of D-Wave. There was exactly one such claim, which we duly investigated, and it did not stand up to scrutiny.
This morning, commenter rrtucci pointed me to TIME Magazine’s cover story about D-Wave (yes, in today’s digital media environment, I need Shtetl-Optimized readers to tell me what’s on the cover of TIME…). rrtucci predicted that, soon after reading the article, I’d be hospitalized with a severe stress-induced bleeding ulcer. Undeterred, I grit my teeth, paid the $5 to go behind the paywall, and read the article.
The article, by Lev Grossman, could certainly be a lot worse. If you get to the end, it discusses the experiments by Matthias Troyer’s group, and it makes clear the lack of any practically-relevant speedup today from the D-Wave devices. It also includes a few skeptical quotes:
“In quantum computing, we have to be careful what we mean by ‘utilizing quantum effects,'” says Monroe, the University of Maryland scientist, who’s among the doubters. “This generally means that we are able to store superpositions of information in such a way that the system retains its ‘fuzziness,’ or quantum coherence, so that it can perform tasks that are impossible otherwise. And by that token there is no evidence that the D-Wave machine is utilizing quantum effects.”
One of the closest observers of the controversy has been Scott Aaronson, an associate professor at MIT and the author of a highly influential quantum-computing blog [aww, shucks –SA]. He remains, at best, cautious. “I’m convinced … that interesting quantum effects are probably present in D-Wave’s devices,” he wrote in an email. “But I’m not convinced that those effects, right now, are playing any causal role in solving any problems faster than we could solve them with a classical computer. Nor do I think there’s any good argument that D-Wave’s current approach, scaled up, will lead to such a speedup in the future. It might, but there’s currently no good reason to think so.”
Happily, the quote from me is something that I actually agreed with at the time I said it! Today, having read the Shin et al. paper—which hadn’t yet come out when Grossman emailed me—I might tone down the statement “I’m convinced … that interesting quantum effects are probably present” to something like: “there’s pretty good evidence for quantum effects like entanglement at a ‘local’ level, but at the ‘global’ level we really have no idea.”
Alas, ultimately I regard this article as another victim (through no fault of the writer, possibly) of the strange conventions of modern journalism. Maybe I can best explain those conventions with a quickie illustration:
MAGIC 8-BALL: THE RENEGADE MATH WHIZ WHO COULD CHANGE NUMBERS FOREVER
An eccentric billionaire, whose fascinating hobbies include nude skydiving and shark-taming, has been shaking up the scientific world lately with his controversial claim that 8+0 equals 17 [… six more pages about the billionaire redacted …] It must be said that mathematicians, who we reached for comment because we’re diligent reporters, have tended to be miffed, skeptical, and sometimes even sarcastic about the billionaire’s claims. Not surprisingly, though, the billionaire and his supporters have had some dismissive comments of their own about the mathematicians. So, which side is right? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle? At this early stage, it’s hard for an outsider to say. In the meantime, the raging controversy itself is reason enough for us to be covering this story using this story template. Stay tuned for more!
As shown (for example) by Will Bourne’s story in Inc. magazine, it’s possible for a popular magazine to break out of the above template when covering D-Wave, or at least bend it more toward reality. But it’s not easy.
More detailed comments:
Update (Feb. 4): After Luke Muelhauser of MIRI interviewed me about “philosophical progress,” Luke asked me for other people to interview about philosophy and theoretical computer science. I suggested my friend and colleague Ronald de Wolf of the University of Amsterdam, and I’m delighted that Luke took me up on it. Here’s the resulting interview, which focuses mostly on quantum computing (with a little Kolmogorov complexity and Occam’s Razor thrown in). I read the interview with admiration (and hoping to learn some tips): Ronald tackles each question with more clarity, precision, and especially levelheadedness than I would.
Another Update: Jeff Kinne asked me to post a link to a forum about the future of the Conference on Computational Complexity (CCC)—and in particular, whether it should continue to be affiliated with the IEEE. Any readers who have ever had any involvement with the CCC conference are encouraged to participate. You can read all about what the issues are in a manifesto written by Dieter van Melkebeek.
Yet Another Update: Some people might be interested in my response to Geordie Rose’s response to the Shin et al. paper about a classical model for the D-Wave machine.
“How ‘Quantum’ is the D-Wave Machine?” by Shin, Smith, Smolin, Vazirani goo.gl/JkLg0l – was previous skepticism too GENEROUS to D-Wave?
D-Wave not of broad enough interest? OK then, try “AM with Multiple Merlins” by Dana Moshkovitz, Russell Impagliazzo, and me goo.gl/ziSUz9
“Remarks on the Physical Church-Turing Thesis” – my talk at the FQXi conference in Vieques, Puerto Rico is now on YouTube goo.gl/kAd9TZ
Cool new SciCast site (scicast.org) lets you place bets on P vs NP, Unique Games Conjecture, etc. But glitches remain to be ironed out
Update (Jan. 23): Daniel Lidar, one of the authors of the “Defining and detecting…” paper, was kind enough to email me his reactions to this post. While he thought the post was generally a “very nice summary” of their paper, he pointed out one important oversight in my discussion. Ironically, this oversight arose from my desire to bend over backwards to be generous to D-Wave! Specifically, I claimed that there were maybe ~10% of randomly-chosen 512-qubit problem instances on which the D-Wave Two slightly outperformed the simulated annealing solver (compared to ~75% where simulated annealing outperformed the D-Wave Two), while also listing several reasons (such as the minimum annealing time, and the lack of any characterization of the “good” instances) why that “speedup” is likely to be entirely an artifact. I obtained the ~10% and ~75% figures by eyeballing Figure 7 in the paper, and looking at which quantiles were just above and just below the 100 line when N=512.
However, I neglected to mention that even the slight “speedup” on ~10% of instances, only appears when one looks at the “quantiles of ratio”: in other words, when one plots the probability distribution of [Simulated annealing time / D-Wave time] over all instances, and then looks at (say) the ~10% of the distribution that’s best for the D-Wave machine. The slight speedup disappears when one looks at the “ratio of quantiles”: that is, when one (say) divides the amount of time that simulated annealing needs to solve its best 10% of instances, by the amount of time that the D-Wave machine needs to solve its best 10%. And Rønnow et al. give arguments in their paper that ratio of quantiles is probably the more relevant performance comparison than quantiles of ratio. (Incidentally, the slight speedup on a few instances also only appears for certain values of the parameter r, which controls how many possible settings there are for each coupling. Apparently it appears for r=1, but disappears for r=3 and r=7—thereby heightening one’s suspicion that we’re dealing with an artifact of the minimum annealing time or something like that, rather than a genuine speedup.)
There’s one other important point in the paper that I didn’t mention: namely, all the ratios of simulated annealing time to D-Wave time are normalized by 512/N, where N is the number of spins in the instance being tested. In this way, one eliminates the advantages of the D-Wave machine that come purely from its parallelism (which has nothing whatsoever to do with “quantumness,” and which could easily skew things in D-Wave’s favor if not controlled for), while still not penalizing the D-Wave machine in absolute terms.
A few days ago, a group of nine authors (Troels Rønnow, Zhihui Wang, Joshua Job, Sergio Boixo, Sergei Isakov, David Wecker, John Martinis, Daniel Lidar, and Matthias Troyer) released their long-awaited arXiv preprint Defining and detecting quantum speedup, which contains the most thorough performance analysis of the D-Wave devices to date, and which seems to me to set a new standard of care for any future analyses along these lines. Notable aspects of the paper: it uses data from the 512-qubit machine (a previous comparison had been dismissed by D-Wave’s supporters because it studied the 128-qubit model only); it concentrates explicitly from the beginning on comparisons of scaling behavior between the D-Wave devices and comparable classical algorithms, rather than getting “sidetracked” by other issues; and it includes authors from both USC and Google’s Quantum AI Lab, two places that have made large investments in D-Wave’s machines and have every reason to want to see them succeed.
Let me quote the abstract in full:
The development of small-scale digital and analog quantum devices raises the question of how to fairly assess and compare the computational power of classical and quantum devices, and of how to detect quantum speedup. Here we show how to define and measure quantum speedup in various scenarios, and how to avoid pitfalls that might mask or fake quantum speedup. We illustrate our discussion with data from a randomized benchmark test on a D-Wave Two device with up to 503 qubits. Comparing the performance of the device on random spin glass instances with limited precision to simulated classical and quantum annealers, we find no evidence of quantum speedup when the entire data set is considered, and obtain inconclusive results when comparing subsets of instances on an instance-by-instance basis. Our results for one particular benchmark do not rule out the possibility of speedup for other classes of problems and illustrate that quantum speedup is elusive and can depend on the question posed.
Since the paper is exceedingly well-written, and since I have maybe an hour before I’m called back to baby duty, my inclination is simply to ask people to RTFP rather than writing yet another long blog post. But maybe there are four points worth calling attention to:
Those seeking something less technical might want to check out an excellent recent article in Inc. by Will Bourne, entitled “D-Wave’s dream machine” (“D-Wave thinks it has built the first commercial quantum computer. Mother Nature has other ideas”). Wisely, Bourne chose not to mention me at all in this piece. Instead, he gradually builds a skeptical case almost entirely on quotes from people like Seth Lloyd and Daniel Lidar, who one might have thought would be more open to D-Wave’s claims. Bourne’s piece illustrates that it is possible for the mainstream press to get the D-Wave story pretty much right, and that you don’t even need a physics background to do so: all you need is a willingness to commit journalism.
Oh. I’d be remiss not to mention that, in the few days between the appearance of this paper and my having a chance to write this post, two other preprints of likely interest to the Shtetl-Optimized commentariat showed up on quant-ph. The first, by a large list of authors mostly from D-Wave, is called Entanglement in a quantum annealing processor. This paper presents evidence for a point that many skeptics (including me) had been willing to grant for some time: namely, that the states generated by the D-Wave machines contain some nonzero amount of entanglement. (Note that, because of a technical property called “stoquasticity,” such entanglement is entirely compatible with the machines continuing to be efficiently simulable on a classical computer using Quantum Monte Carlo.) While it doesn’t address the performance question at all, this paper seems like a perfectly fine piece of science.
From the opposite side of the (eigen)spectrum comes the latest preprint by QC skeptic Michel Dyakonov, entitled Prospects for quantum computing: Extremely doubtful. Ironically, Dyakonov and D-Wave seem to agree completely about the irrelevance of fault-tolerance and other insights from quantum computing theory. It’s just that D-Wave thinks QC can work even without the theoretical insights, whereas Dyakonov thinks that QC can’t work even with the insights. Unless I missed it, there’s no new scientific content in Dyakonov’s article. It’s basically a summary of some simple facts about QC and quantum fault-tolerance, accompanied by sneering asides about how complicated and implausible it all sounds, and how detached from reality the theorists are.
And as for the obvious comparisons to previous “complicated and implausible” technologies, like (say) classical computing, or heavier-than-air flight, or controlled nuclear fission? Dyakonov says that such comparisons are invalid, because they ignore the many technologies proposed in previous eras that didn’t work. What’s striking is how little he seems to care about why the previous technologies failed: was it because they violated clearly-articulated laws of physics? Or because there turned out to be better ways to do the same things? Or because the technologies were simply too hard, too expensive, or too far ahead of their time? Supposing QC to be impossible, which of those is the reason for the impossibility? Since we’re not asking about something “arbitrary” here (like teaching a donkey to read), but rather about the computational power of Nature itself, isn’t it of immense scientific interest to know the reason for QC’s impossibility? How does Dyakonov propose to learn the reason, assuming he concedes that he doesn’t already know it?
(As I’ve said many times, I’d support even the experiments that D-Wave was doing, if D-Wave and its supporters would only call them for what they were: experiments. Forays into the unknown. Attempts to find out what happens when a particular speculative approach is thrown at NP-hard optimization problems. It’s only when people obfuscate the results of those experiments, in order to claim something as “commercially useful” that quite obviously isn’t yet, that they leave the realm of science, and indeed walk straight into the eager jaws of skeptics like Dyakonov.)
Anyway, since we seem to have circled back to D-Wave, I’d like to end this post by announcing my second retirement as Chief D-Wave Skeptic. The first time I retired, it was because I mistakenly thought that D-Wave had fundamentally changed, and would put science ahead of PR from that point forward. (The truth seems to be that there were, and are, individuals at D-Wave committed to science, but others who remain PR-focused.) This time, I’m retiring for a different reason: because scientists like the authors of the “Defining and detecting” preprint, and journalists like Will Bourne, are doing my job better than I ever did it. If the D-Wave debate were the American Civil War, then my role would be that of the frothy-mouthed abolitionist pamphleteer: someone who repeats over and over points that are fundamentally true, but in a strident manner that serves only to alienate fence-sitters and allies. As I played my ineffective broken record, the Wave Power simply moved from one triumph to another, expanding its reach to Google, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and beyond. I must have looked like a lonely loon on the wrong side of history.
But today the situation is different. Today Honest Abe and his generals (Honest Matthias and his coauthors?) are meeting the Wave Power on the battlefield of careful performance comparisons against Quantum Monte Carlo and simulated annealing. And while the battles might continue all the way to 2000 qubits or beyond, the results so far are not looking great for the Wave Power. The intractability of NP-complete problems—that which we useless, ivory-tower theorists had prophesied years ago, to much derision and laughter—would seem to be rearing its head. So, now that the bombs are bursting and the spins decohering in midair, what is there for a gun-shy pampleteer like myself to do but sit back and watch it all play out?
Well, and maybe blog about it occasionally. But not as “Chief Skeptic,” just as another interested observer.
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