I'm rather tired of this ai apologism bit where every downside is explained away as "it would've happened anyways". AI destroying people's brains and causing paychosis? They would've gone psychotic anyways! AI causing company culture problems? The company was toxic anyways!
Instruments are not inculpable as you think they are.
I dont know where that “Those who cannot do, teach” bullshit came from but it's absolute nonsense someone made up to dunk on teachers.
It doesnt even make sense in your post because "programming" isn't "doing computer science". You're not better than a teacher in any notion because you asked chatgpt to generate some slop.
This whole article is just a nothingburger. Saying something is applied topology is only one step more advanced than saying something is maths - duh. These mathematical abstractions are incredibly general and and you can pretty much draw up anything in terms of anything, the challenging part is being able to turn around and use the model/abstraction to say things about the thing you're abstracting. I don't think scholars have been very successful in that regard, less so this article.
Yeah deep learning is applied topology, it's also applied geometry, and probably applied algebra and I wouldn't be surprised if it was also applied number theory.
> Good luck helping somebody paralyzed from the neck down live a fulfilling life.
Honestly, you seem to suffer from a lack of imagination. There are famous examples of people profoundly paralyzed who most likely lived fulfilling lives (e.g. Stephen Hawking), and I believe there's research the people's happiness tends to return to baseline after both very good and very bad events.
I read his comment as an attempt to add nuance; people paralyzed from the neck down have various experiences. For example, in this study [1], only 12% of those with tetraplegy rated their quality of life as poor or very poor
> Please don't trivialize peoples stuggles by offering pithy anecdotes.
I think you're mistaken, I didn't trivialize anything.
If anything's being trivialized, it was the value of quadriplegic people, who some internet rando blithely declared as all being incapable of having a "fulfilling life."
I'm sorry if this is nitpicky but your comment is hilarious to me - doubling something is doubling something, "changing the order of magnitude" would entail multiplication by 10.
Hahaha not at all, great catch. Sometimes my gray matter just totally craps out... like thinking of "changing order of magnitude" as "adding 1 extra digit".
Reminds me of the time my research director pulled me aside for defining CPU as "core processing unit" instead of "central processing unit" in a paper!
Not only you're responding with an ad-hominem, which is blatantly bad enough; but you're doing it against Benjamin Franklin? One of the most influential thinkers of his time who has contributed to the liberty of way more people than you ever will?
Did you really think "they just call them grandma/pa" was a good argument against people not knowing their grandparents' names? What do you think people in other parts of the world call their grandparents?
I spent 30 years being wrong about my grandmom's given name, because my granddad called her by other name than the official one[0], and in all those decades there was hardly an opportunity for me to notice or for someone to correct me. Grandma was always "grandma".
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[0] - Anna vs. Hanna. Close enough to be ambiguous in speech.
The paper is saying that attempting to simulate the device in code is a valuable lesson to students for precisely the reason that it cannot be done (correctly), thereby illustrating the limits of classical computation.
> In the current paper, we make use of the recently published work in quantum information theory by Candela to have students write code to simulate the operation of the device in that article. Analysis of the device has significant pedagogical value—a fact recognized by Feynman—and simulation of its operation provides students a unique window into quantum mechanics without prior knowledge of the theory.
Nowhere in the text you quoted (nor in the article body) it is said that simulation of this device can not be done. Had you read the paper you'd see that it _is_ about simulating this device. From the introduction: "After students are introduced to several projects in quantum computer simulation, they write code to simulate the operation of Mermin’s quantum device."
This is immaterial, however. It is a well known fact that BQP is in PSPACE and Clifford circuits (a subclass of quantum circuits) can not only be simulated classically, but done so efficiently. It is not controversial.
Of course, Mermin's device can be simulated in a classical computer, we do quantum physics simulations for research all the time. That doesn't entail that we can have quantum computer speedups on a classical computer.
Indeed, the whole point of Mermin's device is to give a very simple illustration for how it is impossible to replicate the behaviour of two entangled particles using classical particles (with hidden variables).
Now is this specific characteristic of entanglement an absolute requirement for quantum computing speedups? Could we have similar speedups with probabilistic hidden-variable algorithms? Probably not, but it is a good question. It is true that if you spend time reading research papers in the field, it is still not clear what the edge is between problems that can be sped up by quantum computers and which cannot, or if there is even an edge at all.
The device cannot be accurately simulated using a classical computer because it relies on quantum entanglement that has no counterpart in classical physics. The results cannot be simulated even if hidden local variables are used.
The only way to simulate accurately on a classical computer is to use global state but this goes against the instruction that the devices must be isolated from each other.
> This is immaterial, however. It is a well known fact that BQP is in PSPACE and Clifford circuits (a subclass of quantum circuits) can not only be simulated classically, but done so efficiently. It is not controversial.
Yes, BQP problems are solvable and a "subclass" of quantum circuits can be simulated efficiently. But the fact is there are known aspects of reality that cannot be simulated on a classical computer.
> The only way to simulate accurately on a classical computer is to use global state but this goes against the instruction that the devices must be isolated from each other.
No shit. Of course you can't take a simulation method that takes exponential running time in terms of the size of the thing you're simulating (two Mermin devices), then simulate each half (each Mermin device) independently. If you could split it up like that you'd have a polynomial time simulation method!
BQP (Bounded-error Quantum Polynomial-time) is in PSPACE sure, but that doesn't mean much.
P ⊆ BPP ⊆ BQP ⊆ PSPACE
BQP problems can be solved on quantum computers in polynomial time, some of these problems may be outside of P and BPP (Bounded-error Probabilistic Polynomial-time), so they may not be possible to solve in polynomial time in classical computers, even with probabilistic algorithms.
It is true that there's still room for BPP = BQP, that has not been disproven, but it is somewhat controversial to expect so, at this point many smart people have spent their lifetimes prodding at it.
Instruments are not inculpable as you think they are.