
Quantum A.I. Publications - sonabinu
https://research.google.com/pubs/QuantumAI.html
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blauditore
Does anyone know a good resource about quantum computing for quantum physics
beginners? I've tried to understand the concepts from Wikipedia, but it's a
bit too abstract and I keep on getting lost down the rabbit hole reading up
about the QP terms being used.

All I understand so far is that apparently, thanks to many independently
controllable quantum states, some NP problems can be solved in polynomial
time. If I'm not mistaken, this would require infinitely many possible
different quantum states, but I've never seen this stated (or contradicted)
explicitly anywhere.

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nlperguiy
I'm not sure if materials on edx are still available but Quantum Mechanics and
Quantum Computing [1] course there was mindblowing. I was surprised how the
ideas and maths were simple enough.

[1]: [https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-quantum-
computa...](https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-quantum-computation-
uc-berkeleyx-cs-191x)

~~~
flor1s
At least the videos can be found on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT5rFIZZeKI&list=PL2jykFOD1A...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT5rFIZZeKI&list=PL2jykFOD1AWap0r8WOuZ-08BFgMyx-5RT)

Maybe the notes of his course at Berkeley can be used to supplement the
videos?
[http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/f16quantum.html](http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/f16quantum.html)

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pwdisswordfish2
RANT: As a researcher in quantum optics and spectroscopy, holy shit am I tired
of reading through these comment threads where it's clear that nobody
understands the topic, yet people still make assertive nicely-sounding
statements that are bound to get up-voted by other people who also don't
understand the topic. ~ugh~

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_Wintermute
It's only when HN discuss a topic in which you are an expert in that you
realise 90% of the comments are absolute nonsense. It happens every time there
is a biology topic as well.

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grenoire
Same with economics; when someone says in the comments for a rant piece that
homo economicus is a core concept of all modern economics because that's what
they learned in that one 101 class they took... Grr...

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dsacco
It must be quite fun for you to read so many armchair financiers here
reconstructing modern economics from first principles on the one hand, while
throwing in gems like “economics is not a science” because “not all
participants are rational actors as usually assumed” on the other :)

~~~
grenoire
That's very apt. Except it stops being fun pretty quickly.

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m3kw9
I would rather them just stick with Arxiv and then when they have something
actually working practically, then post how it actually works. Sort of how
Apple does it in their machine learning journal.

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dreamcompiler
"Soon we hope to falsify the strong Church-Turing thesis: we will perform
computations which current computers cannot replicate."

Yeah, no. This is a ridiculous statement and it is embarrassing to hear it
from Google. Quantum computers are not hyper-Turing machines, and there is no
reason to suspect they ever will be.

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urgoroger
While it is true that compatibility should remain intact, this comment seems
to misunderstand what the STRONG Church-Turing thesis purports (EDIT: at least
the one Google is probably referring to). I'm not sure if it's completely
agreed upon, but the strong Church-Turing thesis that I am familiar with is:
"Every realistic model of computation is polynomial time reducible to
probabilistic Turing machines"
([https://arbital.com/p/strong_Church_Turing_thesis/](https://arbital.com/p/strong_Church_Turing_thesis/))
"A probabilistic Turing machine can efficiently simulate any realistic model
of computation" (An Introduction to Quantum Computing, Phillip Kaye, Raymond
Laflamme, Michele Mosca)

In other words, the efficiency of every realized model of computation needs to
be similar to that of a Turing machine for the thesis to hold. As soon as
machines capable of quantum computation are realized, the thesis is broken, as
they give superpolynomial speedup over classical Turing machines (assuming
things like integer factorization are not in P).

EDIT: I guess it should be noted that there are probably other 'strong Church-
Turing theses' hanging around, but I'm fairly certain the folks at Google are
referring to this one, which I too am most familiar with. If OP is referring
to one which does not require similar efficiency, then the quotation does seem
kind of ridiculous. I also agree that the part of the quote that says "current
computers cannot replicate" needs to be interpreted with some notion of
efficiency as well.

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ctchocula
From watching a couple of Scott Aaronson videos, I was under the understanding
that Grover's algorithm shows that you don't get an exponential speedup over
classical Turing machines from quantum computation _in general_ , but only for
specific problems that exhibit structure such as integer factorization à la
Shor's algorithm. Here's a quotation from Lecture 10 of his Quantum Computing
series [1]:

"So the bottom line is that, for "generic" or "unstructured" search problems,
quantum computers can give some speedup over classical computers --
specifically, a quadratic speedup -- but nothing like the exponential speedup
of Shor's factoring algorithm."

[1]
[https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.html](https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.html)

~~~
sdenton4
Right. But even having some individual problem that gives an exponential
speedup will break the hypothesis.

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hackernewsacct
How does one get hired to be a researcher at google? What job title or level
would this be? How does being a researcher differ from being a regular SDE?
What background are they looking for here? Do these people write code on a
daily basis?

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deepnotderp
"Soon we hope to falsify the strong Church-Turing thesis: we will perform
computations which current computers cannot replicate. "

WTF, has Google gone completely insane? This is so wrong from every angle...

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LolWolf
See the above thread given in [0]. It sounds weird, but they are talking about
the _strong_ CT thesis (e.g. that all realizable models are polynomial-time-
reducible to BPP), not just the usual one (that no realizable model can solve
halting-hard problems).

\---

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15785215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15785215)

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jooke
This is still a theoretical problem, not one solvable by building a faster
computer

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LolWolf
You're right that part of the problem is, indeed, theoretical (it remains to
be shown that BPP ≠ BQP, even if it _is_ widely believed to be true), but part
of the problem is also physical (we need to build a model of BQP---i.e. a
quantum computer---to show that there is a physically realizable model of it).

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mtgx
Is this some pre-launch marketing for Google?

I wonder if they're still able to meet their promise that they'll announce a
50-qubit quantum supremacy computer by 2017. Because the year is ending very
soon. Was it delayed, or did IBM crash their party when they announced that
even 56-qubits are not enough for quantum supremacy? (not sure if IBM's test
was enough to prove that, though)

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yters
If we get a useful quantum computer, what then? How will machine learning
improve? As far as I know, QM speeds up integer factorization, but I don't see
how this transfers to machine learning.

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h2j24
Not an expert, but I believe most of the benefits will come from quantum
annealing, which is capable of escaping local minima in optimization problems.

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yters
Simulated annealing is only guaranteed to find the global minimum as time
approaches infinity. Does quantum annealing have a better guarantee?

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SomeStupidPoint
Why is this being upvoted?

It's literally just 20 random quantum computing papers with an unrelated
heading and a Google banner, because they got flagged with a tag somewhere.

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mdturnerphys
The papers aren't random--the names in blue are Google researchers.

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digitalshankar
I rather use Firefox Quantum than Google Quantum AI, yeah I know it's
unrelated and hence the article too.

