{"id":2026,"date":"2014-10-03T16:12:13","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T20:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2026"},"modified":"2017-01-12T15:50:47","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T20:50:47","slug":"speaking-truth-to-parallelism-at-cornell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2026","title":{"rendered":"Speaking Truth to Parallelism at Cornell"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I was at my alma mater, Cornell, to give a talk at the 50th<\/sup> anniversary celebration<\/a> of its computer science department. \u00a0You can watch the streaming video here<\/a>; my talk runs from roughly 1:17:30 to 1:56 (though if you’ve seen other complexity\/physics\/humor shows by me, this one is pretty similar, except for the riff about Cornell at the beginning).<\/p>\n

The other two things in that video—a talk by Tom Henzinger about IST Austria, a bold new basic research institute that he leads, closely modeled after the Weizmann Institute in Israel; and a discussion panel about the future of programming languages—are also really interesting and worth watching. \u00a0There was\u00a0lots of other good stuff at this workshop, including a talk about Google Glass and its applications to photography (by, not surprisingly, a guy wearing a Google Glass—Marc Levoy); a panel discussion with three Turing Award winners, Juris Hartmanis, John Hopcroft, and Ed Clarke, about the early days of Cornell’s CS department; a talk by Amit Singhal, Google’s director of search; a talk about differential privacy by Cynthia Dwork, one of the leading researchers at the recently-closed Microsoft SVC lab (with a poignant and emotional ending); and a talk by my own lab director at MIT, Daniela Rus, about her research in robotics.<\/p>\n

Along with the 50th<\/sup> anniversary celebration, Bill Gates was also on campus to dedicate Bill and Melinda Gates Hall, the new home of Cornell’s CS department. \u00a0Click here for streaming video<\/a> of a Q&A that Gates did with Cornell students, where I thought he\u00a0acquitted himself quite\u00a0well, saying many sensible things about education, the developing world, etc. that other smart people could also say, but that have extra\u00a0gravitas coming from him. \u00a0Gates has also become extremely\u00a0effective at wrapping barbs of fact inside a soft mesh of politically-unthreatening platitudes—but listen carefully and you’ll hear the barbs. \u00a0The amount of\u00a0pomp\u00a0and preparation around Gates’s visit reminded me of when President Obama visited MIT, befitting the two men’s approximately\u00a0equal power. \u00a0(Obama has nuclear weapons, but then again, he also has Congress.)<\/p>\n

And no, I didn’t get to meet Gates or shake his hand, though I did get to stand about ten feet from him at the Gates Hall dedication. \u00a0(He apparently spent most of his time at Cornell meeting with plant breeders, and other people doing things relevant to the Gates Foundation’s interests.)<\/p>\n

Thanks so much to Bobby and Jon Kleinberg, and everyone else who invited me to this fantastic\u00a0event and helped make it happen. \u00a0May Cornell’s CS department have a great next<\/em> 50 years.<\/p>\n

One last remark before I close this post. \u00a0Several readers\u00a0have expressed disapproval and befuddlement over the proposed title of my next book<\/a>, “Speaking Truth to Parallelism.” \u00a0In the words of commenter TonyK<\/a>:<\/p>\n

That has got to be the worst title in the history of publishing! \u201cSpeaking Truth to Parallelism\u201d? It doesn\u2019t even make sense! I count myself as one of your fans, Scott, but you\u2019re going to have to do better than that if you want anybody else to buy your book. I know you can do better \u2014 witness \u201cQuantum Computing Since Democritus\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, my experiences at Cornell this week helped to convince me that, not only does “Speaking Truth to Parallelism” make perfect<\/em> sense, it’s an activity that’s needed now\u00a0more than ever. \u00a0What it means, of course, is fighting a certain na\u00efve, long-ago-debunked\u00a0view\u00a0of quantum computers—namely, that they would achieve exponential speedups\u00a0by simply “trying every possible answer in parallel”—that’s become so entrenched in the minds of many journalists, laypeople, and even scientists from other fields that it feels like nothing you say can\u00a0possibly dislodge it. \u00a0The words out of your mouth will literally be\u00a0ignored, misheard, or even contorted to the opposite of what they mean, if that’s what it takes to\u00a0preserve the listener’s misconception about quantum computers being able to solve\u00a0NP-hard optimization problems by sheer magic. \u00a0(Much like in the Simpsons-visit-Australia episode<\/a>, where Marge’s request for “coffee” is misheard over and over as “beer.”) \u00a0You probably think I’m exaggerating, and I’d agree with you—if I hadn’t experienced this phenomenon\u00a0hundreds of times over\u00a0the last decade.<\/p>\n

So, to take one example: after my talk at Cornell, an audience member came up to me to say that it was a wonderful talk, but that what he really wanted to know was whether I thought quantum computers could solve problems in the “NP space” in linear time, by trying all\u00a0the possible solutions\u00a0at once. \u00a0He didn’t seem to realize that I’d spent the entire\u00a0previous half hour answering that exact question, explaining why the answer was “no.”<\/em> \u00a0Coincidentally, this week I also got an email from a longtime reader of this blog, saying that he read and loved Quantum Computing Since Democritus<\/em>, and wanted my feedback on a popular article he’d written about quantum computing. \u00a0What was the gist of the article? \u00a0You guessed it: “quantum computing = generic exponential speedups for optimization, machine learning, and Big Data problems, by trying all the possible answers at once.”<\/p>\n

These people’s enthusiasm\u00a0for quantum computing tends to be so genuine, so sincere, that I find myself unable to blame them—even when they’ve done the equivalent of going\u00a0up to Richard Dawkins and thanking him for having taught\u00a0them that evolution works for\u00a0the good of the entire species, just as its wise Designer intended. \u00a0I do blame the media and other careless or unscrupulous parties for misleading people about quantum computing, but\u00a0most of all I blame myself, for not making my explanations clear enough. \u00a0In the end, then, meeting the “NP space”\u00a0folks\u00a0only makes me want to redouble my efforts to\u00a0Speak Truth to Parallelism: eventually<\/em>, I feel, the nerd world will get\u00a0this point.<\/p>\n

\n

Update (Oct. 4):<\/strong><\/span> I had regarded this (perhaps wrongly) as too obvious to state, but particularly for non-native English speakers, I’d better clarify: “speaking truth to parallelism” is a deliberate pun on the left-wing protester phrase “speaking truth to power.”<\/a>\u00a0 So whatever\u00a0linguistic oddness there is in my phrase, I’d say it simply inherits from the original.<\/p>\n

Another Update (Oct. 7):<\/strong><\/span> See this comment<\/a> for my short summary of what’s known about the actual technical question (can quantum computers solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, or not?).<\/p>\n

Another Update (Oct. 8):<\/strong><\/span> Many commenters wrote to point out that the video of my talk at Cornell is now password-protected, and no longer publicly available. \u00a0I wrote to my contacts at Cornell to ask\u00a0about this, and they said they’re planning to release lightly-edited versions of the\u00a0videos soon, but will look into the matter in the meantime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I was at my alma mater, Cornell, to give a talk at the 50th anniversary celebration of its computer science department. \u00a0You can watch the streaming video here; my talk runs from roughly 1:17:30 to 1:56 (though if you’ve seen other complexity\/physics\/humor shows by me, this one is pretty similar, except for the […]<\/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_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":[10,5,4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures-in-meatspace","category-complexity","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\/2026","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=2026"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2036,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026\/revisions\/2036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}