{"id":10587,"date":"2014-01-26T16:07:03","date_gmt":"2014-01-26T16:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=10587"},"modified":"2014-01-26T16:07:03","modified_gmt":"2014-01-26T16:07:03","slug":"two-cultures-in-one-of-the-cultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2014\/01\/26\/two-cultures-in-one-of-the-cultures\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Cultures in One of the Cultures"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"This<\/a>A long time ago in a mental universe far far away I gave a talk to a theory seminar<\/a> about quantum algorithms. An excerpt from the abstract:<\/p>\n

Quantum computers can outperform their classical brethren at a variety of algorithmic tasks….[yadda yadda yadaa deleted]… This talk will assume no prior knowledge of quantum theory…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The other day I was looking at recent or forthcoming interesting quantum talks and I stumbled upon one<\/a> by a living pontiff:<\/p>\n

In this talk, I’ll describe connections between the unique games conjecture (or more precisely, the closely relatedly problem of small-set expansion) and the quantum separability problem… [amazing stuff deleted]…The talk will not assume any knowledge of quantum mechanics, or for that matter, of the unique games conjecture or the Lasserre hierarchy….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And another for a talk<\/a> to kick off a program at the Simons institute on Hamiltonian complexity (looks totally fantastic, wish I could be a fly on the wall at that one!):<\/p>\n

The title of this talk is the name of a program being hosted this semester at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing….[description of field of Hamiltonian complexity deleted…] No prior knowledge of quantum mechanics or quantum computation will be assumed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Talks are tricky. Tailoring your talk to your audience is probably one of the trickier sub-trickinesses of giving a talk. But remind me again, why are we apologizing to theoretical computer scientists \/ mathematicians (which are likely the audiences for the three talks I linked to) for their<\/b> ignorance of quantum theory? Imagine theoretical computer science talks coming along with a disclaimer, “no prior knowledge of the PCP theorem is assumed”, “no prior knowledge of polynomial-time approximation schemes is assumed”, etc. Why is it still considered necessary, decades after Shor’s algorithm and error correction showed that quantum computing is indeed a fascinating and important idea in computer science, to apologize to an audience for a large gap in their basic knowledge of the universe?
\nAs a counter argument, I’d love to hear from a non-quantum computing person who was swayed to attend a talk because it said that no prior knowledge of quantum theory is assumed. Has that ever worked? (Or similar claims of a cross cultural prereq swaying you to bravely go where none of your kind has gone before.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A long time ago in a mental universe far far away I gave a talk to a theory seminar about quantum algorithms. An excerpt from the abstract: Quantum computers can outperform their classical brethren at a variety of algorithmic tasks….[yadda yadda yadaa deleted]… This talk will assume no prior knowledge of quantum theory… The other … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Two Cultures in One of the Cultures”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","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}},"categories":[28,50,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extralusionary-intelligence","category-off-the-deep-end","category-quantum-computing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}