Category Archives: General

A jack of two trades and a master of both

Posted on May 13, 2012 by chb

IBM, in recounting its history of arranging high-profile contests between humans and computers, describes the tension surrounding the final chess game between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov.  One of the machine’s designers “vividly remembers the final game of the six-game … Continue reading →

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Ghost Paper Dance!

Posted on April 3, 2012 by aram

In a belated revival of the Ghost Pontiff’s “Happy Paper Dance” ritual, I’d like to talk about the recent paper The k-local Pauli Commuting Hamiltonians Problem is in P by my student Jijiang (Johnny) Yan and his former advisor, Dave … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 6 Comments

|Democrat> + |Republican> / sqrt(2)?

Posted on March 31, 2012 by aram

It has long been known that party politics exhibits quantum effects. (An excerpt, that I’m sure is not retaliation for Sokal’s hoax, is “…we show evidence using the Smith et. al data that a tenet of a classical model that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 4 Comments

More on the NP-hardness of inferring dynamics

Posted on March 24, 2012 by chb

The previous post on David Voss’ APS piece quibbled perhaps excessively about the definition of NP, but neglected to mention  the actual subject of the piece, which was Cubitt, Eisert and Wolf’s (CEW) recent paper on the NP-hardness of extracting … Continue reading →

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Hardness of NP

Posted on March 22, 2012 by chb

In computer science, NP-hard problems are widely believed to be intractable, not because they have been proved so, but on the empirical evidence of no one having found a fast algorithm for any of them in over half a century … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Nitpicker's Paradiso, Words | 1 Comment

What increases when a self-organizing system organizes itself? Logical depth to the rescue.

Posted on February 24, 2012 by chb

(An earlier version of this post appeared in the latest newsletter of the American Physical Society’s special interest group on Quantum Information.) One of the most grandly pessimistic ideas from the 19th century is that of  “heat death” according to … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, General, Mathematics, Physics, Science | 6 Comments

Einstein was right!

Posted on February 22, 2012 by aram

And so was Sergio Bertolucci (CERN research director) when he said “I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time.” Apparently the timing error was likely caused by a loose cable (h/t rrtucci). Perhaps it … Continue reading →

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Having it both ways

Posted on February 8, 2012 by chb

In one of Jorge Luis Borges’ historical fictions, an elderly Averroes, remarking on a misguided opinion of his youth,  says that to be free of an error it is well to have professed it oneself.  Something like this seems to … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Quantum | 5 Comments

Aram's rebuttal

Posted on February 7, 2012 by sflammia

Part one of Aram’s rebuttal is now up at Gödels Lost Letter. Go there and check it out!

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Debate!

Posted on January 30, 2012 by aram

Before I did math, I did debate. And now I’ve found a way to reconcile the two! Gil Kalai is a great researcher in theoretical computer science who has written several articles that are skeptical of the possibility of quantum … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 5 Comments