{"id":1096,"date":"2005-10-11T09:31:53","date_gmt":"2005-10-11T16:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=1096"},"modified":"2005-10-11T09:31:53","modified_gmt":"2005-10-11T16:31:53","slug":"the-power-of-really-really-big-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/10\/11\/the-power-of-really-really-big-computers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Really Really Big Computers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting question at the talk Sunday was, suppose you build a quantum computer, how do you really know that these crazy quantum laws are governing the computer?  What I love about this question is that you can turn it around and ask the same question about classical computers!  At heart we believe that if we put together a bunch of transistors to form a large computation, each of these components is behaving itself and there is nothing new going on as the computer gets larger and larger.  But for quantum computers there is a form of skepticism which says that once your computer large enough, the description of quantum theory will fail in some way (See for example, Scott Aaronson&#8217;s &#8220;Are Quantum States Exponentially Long Vectors?&#8221;, <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/quant-ph\/0507242\">quant-ph\/0507242<\/a>, for a nice discussion along these lines.)  But wait, why shouldn&#8217;t we ask the question of whether classical evolution continues to hold for a computer as it gets bigger and bigger.  Of course, we have never seen such a phenomenon as far as I know.  But if I were really crazy, I would claim that the computer  just isn&#8217;t big enough yet.  And if I were even crazier I would suggest that once a classical computer gets to a certain size its method of computation changes drastically and allows for a totally different notion of computational complexity.   And if I were flipping mad, I would suggest that we do have an example of such a system, and this system is our brain.  Luckily I&#8217;m only crazy, not flipping mad, but still this line of reasoning is fun to pursue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting question at the talk Sunday was, suppose you build a quantum computer, how do you really know that these crazy quantum laws are governing the computer? What I love about this question is that you can turn it around and ask the same question about classical computers! At heart we believe that if &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/10\/11\/the-power-of-really-really-big-computers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Power of Really Really Big Computers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[20,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096","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=1096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}