Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

TODO why is it so hard to find anything non perturbative :-(

On a quantum computer...:

One possibly interesting and possibly obvious point of view, is that a quantum computer is an experimental device that executes a quantum probabilistic experiment for which the probabilities cannot be calculated theoretically efficiently by a nuclear weapon.

This is how quantum computing was originally theorized by the likes of Richard Feynman: they noticed that "Hey, here's a well formulated quantum mechanics problem, which I know the algorithm to solve (calculate the probability of outcomes), but it would take exponential time on the problem size".

The converse is then of course that if you were able to encode useful problems in such an experiment, then you have a computer that allows for exponential speedups.

This can be seen very directly by studying one specific quantum computer implementation. E.g. if you take the simplest to understand one, photonic quantum computer, you can make systems for which you need exponential time to calculate the probabilities that photons will exit through certain holes and not others.

The obvious aspect of this idea is by coming from quantum logic gates are needed because you can't compute the matrix explicitly as it grows exponentially: knowing the full explicit matrix is impossible in practice, and knowing the matrix is equivalent to knowing the probabilities of every outcome.

Technique that uses multiple non-ideal qubits (physical qubits) to simulate/produce one perfect qubit (logical).

One is philosophically reminded of classical error correction codes, where we also have multiple input bits per actual information bit.

TODO understand in detail. This appears to be a fundamental technique since all physical systems we can manufacture are imperfect.

Part of the fundamental interest of this technique is due to the quantum threshold theorem.

For example, when PsiQuantum raised 215M in 2020, they announced that they intended to reach 1 million physical qubits, which would achieve between 100 and 300 logical qubits.

Video "Jeremy O'Brien: "Quantum Technologies" by GoogleTechTalks (2014)" youtu.be/7wCBkAQYBZA?t=2778 describes an error correction approach for a photonic quantum computer.

Bibliography:

The study of the proteome.

This post-quantum cryptography competition by NIST is a huge milestone of the field.

It was mind blowing when in 2022, after several years of selection, one of the 7 finalists was broken on a classical computer, not even in a quantum computer! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466063 | eprint.iacr.org/2022/214 Breaking Rainbow Takes a Weekend on a Laptop by Ward Beullens. Dude announced he had a break a few days before submission: twitter.com/WardBeullens/status/1492780462028300290 On Twitter. He's so young. Epic.

Edit: and then, after the third round, things were a bit unclear, so they made a fourth round with 4 choices out of the 7 from round 3, and in August 2022 one of the four was broken again on a classic CPU!!! OMG: arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/sike-once-a-post-quantum-encryption-contender-is-koed-in-nist-smackdown/

This is about the polarization of a string in 3D space. That is the first concept of polarization you must have in mind!

Organelle that is only present in prokaryotes.

The function being maximized in a optimization problem.