Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Once upon a time, the British Government decided to invest some 80 million into quantum computing.

Jeremy O'Brien told his peers that he had the best tech, and that he should get it all.

Some well connected peers from well known universities did not agree however, and also bid for the money, and won.

Jeremy was defeated. And pissed.

So he moved to Palo Alto and raised a total of $665 million instead as of 2021. The end.

Makes for a reasonable the old man lost his horse.

www.ft.com/content/afc27836-9383-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271 British quantum computing experts leave for Silicon Valley talks a little bit about them leaving, but nothing too juicy. They were called PsiQ previously apparently.More interestingly, the article mentions that this was party advised by early investor Hermann Hauser, who is known to be preoccupied about UK's ability to create companies. Of course, European Tower of Babel.

These are a bit like the Verilog of quantum computing.

One would hope that they are not Turing complete, this way they may serve as a way to pass on data in such a way that the receiver knows they will only be doing so much computation in advance to unpack the circuit. So it would be like JSON is for JavaScript.

One important area of research and development of quantum computing is the development of benchmarks that allow us to compare different quantum computers to decide which one is more powerful than the other.

Ideally, we would like to be able to have a single number that predicts which computer is more powerful than the other for a wide range of algorithms.

However, much like in CPU benchmarking, this is a very complex problem, since different algorithms might perform differently in different architectures, making it very hard to sum up the architecture's capabilities to a single number as we would like.

The only thing that is directly comparable across computers is how two machines perform for a single algorithm, but we want a single number that is representative of many algorithms.

For example, the number of qubits would be a simple naive choice of such performance predictor number. But it is very imprecise, since other factors are also very important:

Quantum volume is another less naive attempt at such metric.

As of 2020, Ciro Santilli is getting excited about quantum computing, which is a deep tech field.

He's a bit lazy to explain why here, but Googling will be more than enough.

There is a risk it will fizzle and the bubble pop, like any revolution.

But recent developments are making it too exciting to ignore.

Really weird and obscure company, good coverage: thequantuminsider.com/2020/02/06/quantum-computing-incorporated-the-first-publicly-traded-quantum-computing-stock/

Publicly traded in 2007, but only pivoted to quantum computing much later.

Social media:

Quantum mechanics is quite a broad term. Perhaps it is best to start approaching it from the division into:

Key experiments that could not work without quantum mechanics: Section "Quantum mechanics experiment".

Mathematics: there are a few models of increasing precision which could all be called "quantum mechanics":

Ciro Santilli feels that the largest technological revolutions since the 1950's have been quantum related, and will continue to be for a while, from deeper understanding of chemistry and materials to quantum computing, understanding and controlling quantum systems is where the most interesting frontier of technology lies.

So that he can work full time on OurBigBook.com and revolutionize advanced university-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics eduction for all ages.

Donating to Ciro is the most effective donation per dollar that you can make to:

Ciro's goal in life is to help kids as young as possible to reach, and the push, the frontiers of natural sciences human knowledge, linking it to applications that might be the the next big thing as early as possible. Because nothing is more motivating to students than that feeling of:rather than repeating the same crap that everyone is already learning.

To do this, Ciro wants to work in parallel both on:

Ciro believes that this rare combination of both:produces a virtuous circle, because Ciro:

As explained at OurBigBook.com and high flying bird scientist, Ciro is most excited to make contributions at the "missing middle level of specialization" that lies around later undergrad and lower grad education:But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:in a way that is:

Ciro believes that today's society just keep saying over and over: "STEM is good", "STEM is good", "STEM is good" as a religious mantra, but fails miserably at providing free learning material and interaction opportunities for people to actually learn it at a deep enough level to truly appreciate why "STEM is good". This is what he wants to fix.

The following quote is ripped from Gwern Branwen's Patreon page, and it perfectly synthesizes how Ciro feels as well:

In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities:

Communicating at a distance, from Greek "tele" for distance!

A very cool thing about telecommunication is, besides how incredibly fast it advanced (in this sense it is no cooler than integrated circuit development), how much physics and information theory is involved in it. Applications of telecommunication implementation spill over to other fields, e.g. some proposed quantum computing approaches are remarkably related to telecommunication technology, e.g. microwaves and silicon photonics.

This understanding made Ciro Santilli wish he had opted for telecommunication engineering when he was back in school in Brazil. For some incomprehensible reason, telecommunications was the least competitive specialization in the electric engineering department at the time, behind even power electronics. This goes to show both how completely unrelated to reality university is, and how completely outdated Brazil is/was. Sad stuff.

We don't need to understand a super generalized version of tensor products to know what they mean in basic quantum computing!

Intuitively, taking a tensor product of two qubits simply means putting them together on the same quantum system/computer.

When we write the bra-ket notation: $|00⟩$ that is the same as $|0⟩\otimes |0⟩$.

The tensor product is called a "product" because it distributes over addition.

E.g. consider:

Intuitively, in this operation we just put a Hadamard gate qubit together with a second pure $|0⟩$ qubit.

And the outcome still has the second qubit as always 0, because we haven't made them interact.

The quantum state $\frac{|00⟩+|10⟩}{\sqrt{2}}$ is called a separable state, because it can be written as a single product of two different qubits. We have simply brought two qubits together, without making them interact.

If we then add a CNOT gate to make a Bell state:we can now see that the Bell state is non-separable: we've made the two qubits interact, and there is no way to write this state with a single tensor product. The qubits are fundamentally entangled.

Discrete quantum system model that can model both spin in the Stern-Gerlach experiment or photon polarization in polarizer.

Also known in quantum computing as a qubit :-)

At first I had intended to create a lot more content for the world class university located where I lived, but I ended up not doing that and just improving the project tech instead.

There are a few reasons for this, good or bad:

The downsides of going for tech first are severe:There are however counterpoints to these as for anything else:

This is a summary of the status of the OurBigBook Project, focusing notably on the past 9 months that I've been able to devote fully to it starting June 2024 notably due to the anonymous 1000 Monero donation and other supporters.

I have 3 months left and after unless some crazy person gives more money, I'll go back to some generic programming job that could be done by many other people so that my wife won't kill me. Hopefully I'll find something in quantum computing or AGI research this time that is not too boring, but we'll see.

I should also note that I have raised my requirement for a second year full time from 100k USD to 200k USD, such that there are about only 144k USD missing as of writing, a bargain. See also Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". I have also set a 2M USD retirement goal in case someone wants to free me to lurk after university students for the rest of my life. Creepy.

The reason for this increase is partly because I'm jealous watching my university peers getting relatively richer and richer than me. More seriously though, as I'm likely going to be looking for a job soon, I don't want to scare employers off too much thinking that it is likely that I'll be leaving in a few months too easily. Plus inflation and the natural lack of security that such endeavour brings.

I shouldn't be doing this on funded OurBigBook time which is until the end of May, but I was getting too nervous and decided to start a casual job search to test the waters.

In particular I want to see if I can get past the HR lady step without toning down my online profiles. If nothing works out for the next round I'll be hiding anything too spicy like:Another interesting point is to see if French companies are more likely to reply given that Ciro Santilli studied at École Polytechnique which the French worship.

I'm looking in particular either for:

I spent the last two weeks doing that:

I'll make sure to add two weeks of OurBigBook work after May to make up for this.

Poor countries don't have a lot of money.

Therefore, you have to pick a few key the next big thing deep tech bets, and invest on those enough.

These have to be few, because your country is poor, and so you can't invest on everything.

Therefore, the bets have to be well selected, because it is useless to make several insufficient investments: you have to pick a few ones, and put enough time and money into each one of them for them to stand any chance. These bets should be made and reevaluated on 5/10 year horizons.

The key things that you have to select are:

And then you only tax those companies heavily when the start to bring in real money. These are startups remember! You only need 5 unicorns a year to call it a success. And countries should not be greedy and invest through equity, but rather recoup their investment through taxation alone.

Ciro's second removed uncle, who was a physicist at the University of Campinas, one of the best universities in the country, told him an anecdote. He had moved from fusion energy research to solar cell research. At some point, there was a research lab that needed 10 million to buy a machinery critical for their experiment. They asked and asked, and finally the government gave them only 2 million. So in the end they spent those 2 million in random ways, but of course did not achieve their research goal and no money came out of it.

He also explained how as a result of the insufficient investments, he felt clearly that some of the semiconductor production facilities related to solar power he saw simply were not able to control the production process adequately to produce consistent silicon. As a result, everything failed sooner or later as people found more and more bugs that they did not have the time to solve.

Another key investment is enticing back experienced exchange-students who have learnt new techniques to be heads of laboratory/founders to back in your country.

A fantastic initiative from Brazil for example is BRASA, which aims to put together Brazilian exchange students to make a difference back in Brazil.

Do not try to forbid external companies from selling in your country. Instead, fund your own companies to be able to fight the external market off. And if they can't, let them die and pick a different bet. Video "How Taiwan Created TSMC by Asianometry (2020)" has a good mention. Protectionism is something that Brazil notably tried to do, and look at what it led, not a single international success.

This is basically how quantum computing was first theorized by Richard Feynman: quantum computers as experiments that are hard to predict outcomes.

TODO answer that: quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5005/why-it-is-hard-to-simulate-a-quantum-device-by-a-classical-devices. A good answer would be with a more physical example of quantum entanglement, e.g. on a photonic quantum computer.