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In the Beginning, We Drove Past

Sunday August 26, 2012, day two of an overnight trip to the Methow Valley staying at the Freestone Inn (we stayed at the inn portion, sans Test dog.)

After breakfast at Wesola Polana, we decided to take a back road from Mazama to Winthrop through Edelweiss along National Forest road 101 to Gunn Ranch road.  From my previous snooping (okay stalking) of land in the Methow Valley, I knew there was at least one lot for sale in this area, and I remember there also being a house for sale.  The drive has some breathtaking views of the Methow Valley and mountains to the west, and I highly recommend it (warning: it’s bumpy.)  Also: lots of chip mucks!  In the winter most of this road is a cross country ski trail.

We found the lot that was for sale, a very nice piece of 20 acres with grand views to the south and west of the Methow Valley, and some views to the east.  Here is a flyer and part of the view

The main issue I had with this land (not to be a negative ninnie), however, was that it wasn’t clear where the best building site would be, and also, unfortunately there is a quite substantial home just down the main view of the valley.  This was the home that was for sale.  Also, while the view was very nice, the acreage itself didn’t have much of interest, being almost uniform steppe brush, with only a few trees.  Me picky?  Never!  A pretty spectacular property, but not one that clicked for us.

So we drove on, past the home for sale, and into Winthrop.  Eventually we meandered to Twisp, and took Maxwell to the dead animal zoo (the local grocery store in Twisp has an amazing big game taxidermy collection) to pick up some snacks for lunch.  Then, on the spur of the moment, we decided to drop in to a realtor (Windermere) to inquire more about buying land in the valley.  The agent sat me down while Maxwell recked havoc in the office, and we went over some property for sale.  I ended up with three good leads: one south of Twisp off of Doe Haven road, one up high on Studhorse mountain on the north side, and a final property, it turns out the Gunn Ranch house that was for sale was also selling a 20+ acre parcel that adjoins the main house’s 20 acres.

So off we went to visit these properties.  The Doe Haven property had a spectacular view of a rock wall, and very nice views north up the valley.  It also had an already installed well.  Bonus!  But it definitely wasn’t clear what the best building site would be that maximized all the views of the property.  Most of the 20 acres in the property was unbuildable and the buildable section would be competing with another cabin in the area (the 20 acre number arises because property off the valley floor is zoned to be at least 20 acres.)

Next stop near the top of Studhorse mountain.  The views from Studhorse mountain were pretty amazing as well, there seemed to be a good building site sheltered in a bit of a cove, that had views to the north, east, and west.  A season creek added some appeal.  Interestingly, however, this property didn’t click with us, perhaps because the view included a nice view up the Chewuch valley, which is lightly, but still noticeably filled with homes.

So back to the final property on our list, back up Gunn Ranch road, to see the land adjacent to the home for sale.  This time we stopped at the home and grabbed a flyer from the realtors box.  Indeed there was a parcel for sale in addition to the home, the 20 acres to the south of the home.  I got out of the car, hopped the barbed wire fence, and went to check it out.  The thing that struck me immediately were the grasshoppers.  Seriously, tons of grasshoppers.  Okay, the grasshoppers just hit me on the leg, but the view, isolation, and terrain really made me catch my breath.

Ostensibly the view was very similar to the other property we had look at on Gunn Ranch road, just up the road.  But there were some differences that seemed to make a bunch of difference.  First, because it was more westernly facing, it had views further to the north, including a peak at Mt. Gardiner.  Second, there was a very amazing grove of trees that ran through the middle of the upper house property and into the middle of the lot for sale.  This grove also contained a seasonal creek.  As you walk down to the section of the property just below this grove of trees, what you find also is that the land seems amazingly wet due to this territorial creek.  So wet that there were reeds and an amazing mixture of grasses.  Finally, one of the notable things about this land in contrast to the lot up the road, was that it sits in such a way that there is a small hill blocking the town of Winthrop off from the view and giving the feeling that you are really far away from town, even though the town is just down the road.  Even better, the home in the adjoining 20 acres was, luckily, completely hidden from what seemed to be the best building site.

In short, we immediately realized that this as an amazing chunk of land.  Here are some photos.

View of the property from the road.  If you imagine a line drawn from left to right in front of you, if you push this line out so that it hits that dip in the trees and over to the post on the left, the property lies just beyond (south) of that line.

 

A picture Lisa took from a similar location

And here is a panorama that an architect (more on that later) took from what seems like a prime building spot

This later picture really shows a good idea of why this property feels very special.  The view is amazing to say the least, but also if you’ll notice that there really aren’t a lot of other houses in the view.  One reason for that is that it turns out that most of the land to the south, east, and north is actually Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife land.

And thus it began.  The first time we drove by.  The second time we stopped to get out and take a look.  And what we found is now the beginning of a great new adventure.

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The Viewpoint Skeptics of Quantum Computers Don’t Want You To Hear

Quantum computers are fascinating devices.  Our current understanding of these devices is that they can do something that classical computers cannot: they can factor numbers in polynomial time (thank you Peter Shor!)  Interestingly, however, we can’t prove that these devices outperform classical computers on any class of problems.  What this means is something very particularly: we can’t show that the model of a quantum Turing machine can solve problems more efficiently than the classical model of a Turing machine.  Complexity theorists say that we can’t show that BPP does not equal BQP.  Complexity theorists remind me of my son learning new letters.  Sorry I can’t help it.  S. T. O. P. spells….stop!

A dark secret (okay it’s not really secret, but this is a blog) of classical computing is that we (or rather, they, since I’m as much a complexity theorist as I am handsomely good looking) also can’t say a lot along the same lines about classical computers.  The most famous example of this, currently (2012), is that classically we don’t know whether there are computations which take polynomial (in the size of the problem) space and unlimited time, but can’t be done with just a polynomial (in the size of the problem) limit in time.  In jargon this is the fact that we don’t know whether P (or BPP) equals PSPACE.  That’s a huge gap, because PSPACE includes nearly everything in the sun, including computers which use time machines.  That’s right.  Classical complexity theory has yet to show that computers that use frickin’ time machines aren’t more powerful than the laptop I’m typing this on.

A reasonable person, I would think, given this state of affairs, would admit that we just don’t know and try to figure out more about the model of quantum computation.  Interesting, however, academia attracts an interesting class of hyper smart person who try to get places in life by being contrarian.  That’s great when it leads to results, and often it does.  Being skeptical is an important part of the scientific process.  But when it doesn’t lead to results, which I think is the current state of arguments about quantum computers, it leads to senior professors acting very unprofessionally, and stifling a field.  Quantum computing is in exactly this state of existence.  I can count the number of jobs given to theorists in quantum computing over the last decade on my hands.  It’s far greater than the number of senior folks I’ve talked to who are credulously skeptical of quantum computers and show know better (i.e. they’ve at least read the relevant papers.)  The number who are skeptical but who haven’t actually read the papers?  My registers don’t count that high.

For an example of this phenomenon, hop on over at to the awesome and widely read blog Godel’s Lost Letter and P=NP where one of the coauthors of the blog Ken Regan has a post describing some work on trying to understanding the limits of quantum computers.  That’s great!  But in this post, Ken, who is an associate professor, can’t help but in a dig at quantum computers along the lines of “we can’t prove that it can’t do anything”:

But there is no proof today—let me repeat, no proof—that quantum circuits in BQP are not easy to simulate classically

Because I like poking tigers, and am no longer beholden to the whims of an academic community that strongly rejects quantum computing, I posted a comment (okay I’d post this even when I was a psuedo-professor) which included the last line

Oh, and, p.s. there is also no proof that classical circuits can’t solve NP-complete problems efficiently, but for some reason I don’t see that in all of your posts on classical computers ;)

to which Ken responded

As for “no proof”, Dick provided some thoughts which I merged into my intro; I pondered upgrading that line to add “…, nor even a convincing hardness argument”—but thought that better left-alone in the post

So you can see the kind of thoughts that go through many theoretical computer scientists which confronted with quantum computing.  Instead of “lets figure this out” the response is “I want to remind you that we haven’t proved anything, even though we also haven’t proved the same thing about likely even more powerful models of computation.”  If you don’t think this isn’t a case of bias in academia, then you’re reading a different novel than I am.  And if you don’t think this has an impact on junior academics, please see the correlation evidence of past hiring in academia (Or if you don’t like that: do an experiment.  Give the damn people the jobs to hang themselves by.  Or at least don’t give them advice to avoid quantum computing because of your own biases, I’m looking at you, you know who you are.  Pffst!)

Like I said, however, I think focusing on making actual progress in understanding quantum computers is the important path to take (and to the credit of Ken, who I’m picking on simply because he’s at the top of the temporal queue of a long line of guys who like to pontificate about the power of quantum computers without having any arguments that go beyond “I think…”, he has tried to answer this question.  But not without throwing in a backhand that he seems to find utterly professionally appropriate.)  And of course the previous two paragraphs are enough of the same ad slander’n reasoning, but exactly from my own completely biased perspective.  But toward being *ahem* productive, I’m completely convinced that quantum computers offer significant, proven, reasons to be built.  This is a controversial statement, because I know all complexity theorists will disagree with this point of view.  So this is aimed at the group of people with minds open enough to think not about complexity classes, but about real world experiments (we might call them, physicists.). 😉

The argument is almost as old as quantum computing itself.  These are the so called “black-box” query complexity results in quantum computing, albeit as seen through a physicist’s measuring device.  What these models do is as follows.  They consider a set of black box functions (say functions from n bits to 1 bit, so-called binary functions) and ask one to identify something about this set of black box functions.  For example, the set of functions could be all binary functions that are either constant (on all inputs they output 0 or on all inputs they output 1) or balanced (on half of inputs they output 0 and on the other half they output 1). Then the problem would be to distinguish whether, if I give you a machine that implements one of these functions, whether the function is constant or whether it is balanced.  Then one “measures” the effectiveness of an algorithm for solving this by the number of times that you have to use the black box in order to figure out which set the function belongs to.

So what is the state of query complexity differences between classical and quantum computers?  It can be proven that there are black box problems that can be solved by quantum computers using a polynomial number of queries in the size of the problem, but that require an exponential number of queries classical.  That’s right.  There is a proven exponential separation.  (For those who would like to argue that the comparison is not fair because a quantum device that computes a function implements a different physics than that which gives you a classical computation, I would only note that our world is quantum mechanical, and we can compare a quantum querying of the quantum device to a classical one.  A classical query of this quantum device is exponentially less efficient.)

At this point you may then wonder why all of the fuss about quantum computers not being proven to be more powerful than classical computers.  The answer is interesting and starts with the way we set up the problem.  We were given a black box that computes a classical function.  We can think about this literally as a machine that we can’t probe any deeper into how it actually works.  In this respect it is a sort of a-physical device, one that isn’t connected to the normal context of what a computation is (as modeled by, say a parallel Turing machine.)  Suppose that this were a real physical device, then you could take it apart and look at how it worked.  This means that you could get more information about the computation being performed.  And when you allow this, well, it is then not clear that you couldn’t solve the problems for which quantum computers offer speedups just as fast on a classical computer.  Thus while we know that with respect to these black box problems, quantum computers are exponentially faster than their classical brethren, we can’t carry this over to statements about models of computation.

But take a step back.  Suppose you are an experimental physicist and I give you a black box and ask you to figure out whether the box implements one or another sets of functions.  Well then, if you use this experimental device without peering into its innards, then you really really want to use a quantum computer for your experiment.  The difference between exponential graduate students and polynomial graduate students is most certainly something that will get your grant funded by the NSF.  Because the universe is quantum mechanical, damnit, and if you want to perform experiments that more quickly reveal how that universe operates, you’ve got to query it quantum mechanically to be most efficient.

Okay, you may not be convinced.  You may argue that at its heart you can’t ever have a box that one can’t take apart and probe its innards (can you?)  Fine.  So I’ll modify the game a bit.  I’ll give you a quantum system that is the output of the standard way this device if queried in these computeres $sum_x |x> |f(x)>$.  Now you either get to query this using only classical measurements on this device in the computational basis, or you get to use the full power of quantum computers, querying with a measurement you can build in your quantum laboratory.  In that case, you can show that a quantum experimentalist will exponentially outperform characterizing this state, i.e. solving the given promise problem.  Think about this as a game, a game in which you can win by being quantum mechanical exponentially faster than you could being classical.

Of course this won’t convince anyone, especially not classical theoretical computer scientists (who once were at the vanguard of a totally new field, but now find themselves defending their own legacy code.) Does it at least pass the test of trying to present evidence in either direction for the power of quantum computers?  Not really, for those who refuse to believe that quantum theory isn’t actually the right theory of nature.  But it does seem to tell us something is fundamentally very very different about the ability to use quantum theory in a setting where you’re trying to extract information about an unknown quantum system.  And it’s proven.  And it’s not a way of thinking that the old guys would like you to think 🙂