{"id":1628,"date":"2013-12-24T17:43:27","date_gmt":"2013-12-24T22:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1628"},"modified":"2017-01-12T16:30:59","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T21:30:59","slug":"merry-christmas-my-quantum-computing-research-explained-using-only-the-1000-most-common-english-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1628","title":{"rendered":"Merry Christmas! My quantum computing research explained, using only the 1000 most common English words"},"content":{"rendered":"

[With special thanks to the Up-Goer Five Text Editor<\/a>, which was inspired by\u00a0this xkcd<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

I study computers that would work in a different way than any computer that we have today. \u00a0These computers would be very small, and they would use facts about the world that are not well known to us from day to day life. \u00a0No one has built one of these computers yet—at least, we don’t think they have!—but we can still reason about what they could do for us if we did build them.<\/p>\n

How would these new computers work? Well, when you go small enough, you find that, in order to figure out what the chance is that something will happen, you need to both add and<\/i> take away a whole lot of numbers—one number for each possible way that the thing could happen, in fact. What’s interesting is, this means that the different ways a thing could happen can “kill each other out,” so that the thing never happens at all! I know it sounds weird, but the world of very small things has been known to work that way for almost a hundred years.<\/p>\n

So, with the new kind of computer, the idea is to make the different ways each wrong answer could be reached kill each other out (with some of them “pointing” in one direction, some “pointing” in another direction), while the different ways that the right answer could be reached all point in more or less the same direction. If you can get that to happen, then when you finally look at the computer, you’ll find that there’s a very good chance that you’ll see the right answer. And if you don’t see the right answer, then you can just run the computer again until you do.<\/p>\n

For some problems—like breaking a big number into its smallest parts (say, 43259 = 181 \u00d7 239)—we’ve learned that the new computers would be much, much faster than we think any of today’s computers could ever be. For other problems, however, the new computers don’t look like they’d be faster at all. So a big part of my work is trying to figure out for which problems the new computers would be faster, and for which problems they wouldn’t be.<\/p>\n

You might wonder, why is it so hard to build these new computers? Why don’t we have them already? This part is a little hard to explain using the words I’m allowed, but let me try. It turns out that the new computers would very easily break. In fact, if the bits in such a computer were to “get out” in any way—that is, to work themselves into the air in the surrounding room, or whatever—then you could quickly lose everything about the new computer that makes it faster than today’s computers. For this reason, if you’re building the new kind of computer, you have to keep it very, very carefully away from anything that could cause it to lose its state—but then at the same time, you do<\/i> have to touch the computer, to make it do the steps that will eventually give you the right answer. And no one knows how to do all of this yet. So far, people have only been able to use the new computers for very small checks, like breaking 15 into\u00a03 \u00d7 5. But people are working very hard today on figuring out how to do bigger things with the new kind of computer.<\/p>\n

In fact, building the new kind of computer is so hard, that some people even believe it won’t be possible! But my answer to them is simple. If it’s not possible, then that’s even more interesting to me than if it is<\/i> possible! And either way, the only way I know to find out the truth is to try it and see what happens.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, people pretend that they already built one of these computers even though they didn’t. Or they say things about what the computers could do that aren’t true. I have to admit that, even though I don’t really enjoy it, I do spend a lot of my time these days writing about why those people are wrong.<\/p>\n

Oh, one other thing. Not long from now, it might be possible to build computers that don’t do everything<\/i> that the new computers could eventually do, but that at least do some of it. Like, maybe we could use nothing but light and mirrors to answer questions that, while not important in and of themselves, are still hard to answer using today’s computers. That would at least show that we can do something<\/i> that’s hard for today’s computers, and it could be a step along the way to the new computers. Anyway, that’s what a lot of my own work has been about for the past four years or so.<\/p>\n

Besides the new kind of computers, I’m also interested in understanding what today’s<\/i> computers can and can’t do. The biggest open problem about today’s computers could be put this way: if a computer can check an answer to a problem in a short time, then can a computer also find an answer in a short time? Almost all of us think that the answer is no, but no one knows how to show it. Six years ago, another guy and I figured out one of the reasons why this question is so hard to answer: that is, why the ideas that we already know don’t work.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I have to go to dinner now. I hope you enjoyed this little piece about the kind of stuff that I work on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[With special thanks to the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, which was inspired by\u00a0this xkcd] I study computers that would work in a different way than any computer that we have today. \u00a0These computers would be very small, and they would use facts about the world that are not well known to us from day to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,11,4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complexity","category-nerd-interest","category-quantum","category-speaking-truth-to-parallelism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1629,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628\/revisions\/1629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}