Quantum Letterman

6 Replies to “Quantum Letterman”

1. average age = 1996.8
   It says that Quantum Computerist brag too much and don’t produce enough. That they are stuck in the past. That they haven’t done anything important for 8 years.

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2. Dude, you need to take a serious chill pill on all that negativity that is pent up inside you.
   First of all, it is obvious that, since these are cumulative citation counts, anything that is interesting in the past, oh say, two years, will not easily appear on this list.
   Of course, nothing new is being done, right? Nothing like people like Guifre Vidal and lots of others starting a big revolution in our understanding of simulating quantum systems. Nah, that’s not interesting at all. Or simple proofs of big results in computer science theory because someone had the audacity to think of a strange model of quantum computation where one postselected results. Not very interesting, huh? Or maybe you think results which put the 2-local Hamiltonian into a hard quantum computational complexity class isn’t interesting. Becuase you know, nature would never, ever use such systems, in say, like things like high temperature superconductive systems. Or maybe number ten on this list isn’t interesting enough for you: a totally new way to build a quantum computer. Not interesting, nothing to see here, move on. Maybe the fact that there are thresholds as high as a few percent isn’t interesting to you. Because that might actually lead to building a quantum computer, and well that’s not so interesting, is it. Nor are those grand experimentalists who are making their first forays into scalable architectures doing interesting work. Certainly a waste of their time to really chase this dream of a quantum computer. Might as well crawl back into my hole and I certainly better not brag about any results. Certainly, there is nothing to see here. Oh, I could go on and on about all the stuff that quantum computing has done in the last few years which is just, you know, totally worthless because all those researchers are stuck in the past.
   Fa. Stuck in the past, my rear end.
   Maybe I need a chill pill as well. But my chill pill will be a de-optimisim pill, I guess.

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3. Well, obviously earlier papers will have had more citations than later ones! But even if you looked at the average number of citations per year, citation analysis would remain an incredibly crude measure of importance. It assigns too much weight to papers and textbooks that “represent” some area in people’s minds (like NP-completeness or quantum error-correction), and not enough to papers that answer the central questions in an area.

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4. Cool list. Anyone out there wiling to bet on what the “top 10” will be in say, 5 or 10 years time?

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5. Hard to tell Mick. The world will be such a different place by then… The American Gulf coast and most of Florida will be underwater due to global warming. The Big One and a subsequent tsunami will have struck California, making it a separate island full of smoldering ruins. The U.S. (current national debt $8E12, current pop. 0.3E9) will be wall to wall sweat shops brimming with American laborers trying to pay the interest on their credit card debt to the Chinese Bank of America. China (current pop. 1.3E9, a fifth of the world population) will own Russia and the choicier parts of Europe, (like France, where Chinese will be the only legal language). Not to be outdone, India (current pop. 1.1E9) will have moved half of its burgeoning population to Africa and Australia.

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6. Want to make a bet on those predictions Tucci? What a sad world you predict.

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