
The “Talk” - ChuckMcM
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
======
SapporoChris
So, I have a question. I found the 'article'... well comic, surprisingly easy
to read and I think I learned something. However, my knowledge of quantum
computing has mostly been based on articles that the comic was poking fun at.
I've not had any formal education. So my question is, was this indeed a good
educational comic, or does it just have a different set of problems from other
articles on quantum computing?

~~~
shantly
I don't know what a bunch of words like "event" and "amplitude" (of... what?)
mean in context, to the point that I was able to nod along but didn't actually
understand any of it.

~~~
monktastic1
It's hard to answer your question without giving a course in QM, but this is a
good place to share a pet peeve about this. For some deeply unfortunate
reason, "amplitude" can refer to:

(1) The (complex) coefficient of a component of a state vector.

(2) If we treat that number c as re^(iθ), then _r_ is sometimes called c's
"amplitude" (though it's more often called the "norm" or the "modulus").

(3) Some authors even use it to refer to θ ("The argument is sometimes also
known as the phase or, more rarely and more confusingly, the amplitude" [1])

Luckily, in quantum mechanics, they almost always mean (1). That's the usage
here.

[1]
[http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComplexArgument.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComplexArgument.html)

~~~
boblivion
Wait, why do they call it amplitude when it's the rotational component? What
is the reasoning to call this amplitude?

~~~
monktastic1
I don't know, because they hate us?

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vanderZwan
Apparently this was a collaboration with Scott Aaronson:

> Drawn with great humility and thanks to one of my favorite people. Scott did
> all of the real work, and I threw in some dirty jokes. So, hey, a pretty
> good deal all around.

~~~
triceratops
Scott Aaronson is credited as the first author at the top of the comic. It's
the first panel.

~~~
vanderZwan
Sure, but that does not include the rest of the information of the comment I
quoted

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nthitz
For those unaware, there's an extra "hidden secret" panel of the comic if you
click the Red Button below the comic. :)

~~~
alexeldeib
Is that a dig at Randall Munroe? Went back to click, pleasantly amused.

~~~
joshmarlow
I think they are friends. I seem to remember Munroe mentioning Weinersmith in
something online a few years back.

~~~
skykooler
I mean, he even drew a guest comic for XKCD:
[https://xkcd.com/826/](https://xkcd.com/826/)

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uwotm9
Accidentally clicked on an ad on the site at the bottom, trying to close it.
It sent me to one of those, sites that hijacks the vibrate of your phone, and
a back button that does nothing.

If the creator of the comic is here -- please pick a more ethical ad provider.

~~~
bagacrap
That sounds like a failure of your web browser as much as anything. How on
Earth is your phone vibrating without you granting a site notification
permission? And recent versions of Chrome limit the degree to which
history.pushState() can hijack your back button.

~~~
uwotm9
Um, what? Did you look into this before posting? Here's a link that lets you
toggle vibration, with code examples......

[https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/vibration/](https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/vibration/)

~~~
bagacrap
No, I didn't know about that api. Thanks for the link. I stand by the
statement that it's a browser failure, though, as IMO that should be
restricted by a permission and/or user action, but it appears to require
neither.

~~~
uwotm9
You might be right (though wrong on every specific point), but your comments
are unhelpful, irrelevant, and distracting.

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pmiller2
This inspired me to submit
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380480)
. It's a fairly short (34 page) introduction to QM from a mathematical POV,
emphasizing QM as a generalization of classical probability.

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SamBam
> "Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore
> equivalent."

Throwing shade at Roger Penrose there... (I recognized it because that has
always been my precise take on all his books.)

~~~
buboard
Hahaha yeah that was the icing in the cake. I 'm sorry but you hear that
argument so often it 's worthy of making fun of.

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sundarurfriend
For anyone who's curious about what quantum computing actually is, I recommend
Quantum Computing for the Very Curious [1]. Most articles online either get it
wrong in the "free parallelism for everybody!" way that the comic warns about,
or just scratches the surface and vaguely indicates that that's not what's
going on (like the comic itself does). QCVC was what made me finally feel like
I actually had a little foothold in QC land in the sense of slightly
understanding what people do when they do quantum computing. It's pretty long
but a pretty easy read.

[1] [https://quantum.country/qcvc](https://quantum.country/qcvc)

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pengstrom
I can't recommend SMBC enough. It's clever, insightful and just plain funny.

The Superman one always gets me: [https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/2011-07-13](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13)

Do you have any favorites?

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fragmede
(Note that this was posted December 14, 2016)

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justinzollars
Little known fact. Weinersmith. I went to high school with Kelly Smith who
married Zach Weiner. They created Weinersmith.

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nickelcitymario
I'm not ashamed to admit this was entirely new to me. I've been listening to
the wrong people.

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aj7
So how do you formulate a useful problem such that a quantum computer will
have the amplitudes interfere to create the answer? Can the low number of
Q-bit computers available factor small integers, for instance?

~~~
Filligree
That's a good question! And one we're still working on, though some books have
been written.

This question describes about half the field of quantum computing, so it isn't
something I can answer in a post this size.

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yalogin
I, just like the comic says, read a few of those blogs that say QC is like
operations done in parallel and I really believed that.

Are there some good links out there for someone to understand the concept in a
bit more depth.

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mey
As a SE, what is a problem quantum computers would be ideal to solve over a
more traditional computer (CPU/gpu/fpga/etc)?

Please challenge my current assumptions

    
    
      - Would not be Turing complete
      - More qubits are needed for practical applications
      - Practical application in cracking crypto
    

I know if I fully understood the how, I might be able to answer the above, but
would love some expert opinions.

~~~
MauranKilom
I'm not qualified to answer, but just wanted to let you know that I found this
post hard to parse. The last point is a constraint and not an assumption, but
the others are. The second point is not a property of a problem, but the
others are. They also all have different moods. And I don't know what "SE" is
in this context.

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braindead_in
What about entaglement?

~~~
knodi123
Um... ask your father.

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emnalyeriar
Is this the article the author mentions? [https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-
alone-cannot-explain-the-...](https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-
explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness)

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sidcool
I have been fascinated how once we figure out the relationship between quantum
mechanics and relativity, we will be Gods. Is it just a matter of
misinterpretation? Is there no spooky action at distance?

~~~
madhadron
> once we figure out the relationship between quantum mechanics and
> relativity, we will be Gods.

Huh?

~~~
emerongi
I feel like the author of that comment looks at it kind of like the discovery
of the electron: once we learn how to control it, we can achieve things that
were never possible before.

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personjerry
This was surprisingly educational and incredibly approachable.

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kyle-rb
Another recent SMBC was about the Elitzur Vaidman bomb tester, which I had
never heard of before, and after staring at Wikipedia for a while, I have a
somewhat better understanding of what quantum interference means, and sort of
proved to myself that all this quantum stuff is actually real/has potential
useful applications.

[https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/duuude](https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/duuude)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_tester)

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djsumdog
I remember looking up stuff on quantum computing a few years back. At the time
a lot of the YouTube videos were by maths professors, and they were all very
good and didn't skip on the complex maths (although I got the gist, a lot went
over my head, but I knew I could probably get it if I reviewed all my
polar/complex notation and maths).

Some videos used some of the simulators that could simulate a few qbits. I
remember that as you added qbits, the amount of ram you needed grew massively
(exponentially?). Everything that could be done with a quantum machine could
be done with a classical machine, it would just have larger space or time
requirements.

I feel like this comic tries to get across a lot of the higher level concepts
without using the stupid analogies used in a lot of pop science articles. It's
not necessary for understanding the actual maths, but it does help with larger
concepts. It's honestly something I'd expect from PhD comics. I stopped
reading both SMBC and PhD a while back; need to catch up on my RSS feeds :)

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reilly3000
How he managed to make quantum mechanics so ...titillating was quite a feat.

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adultSwim
Neat! This is like programming with monads

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CharlesColeman
> Popular Scientism

Heh.

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transitionnel
Great comic! How I visualize this stuff is really simple, and so far it
doesn't seem to be wrong...

Imagine 2 tennis balls floating in space, each spinning in some direction at
some speed.

The quantum amplitude is the extent to which they are matched, or opposed,
when you break down the inertia of each into vectors. In fact I'm pretty sure
their measurements are very limited in the extent to which they can measure
these things to infinite precision. (Duh)

Is this another case of obfuscation by academics? This is truly not
complicated. It's even kinda fun. I think we all have a little fear of being
mentally outgunned, and fear does what it's always done to creative thought.
Dominated it.

~~~
kmill
I'm wondering what you mean by "doesn't seem to be wrong" \-- are you doing
any calculations? I'm not able to follow exactly what you mean by the quantum
amplitude coming from a pair of tennis balls.

My understanding of the spin of a particle is that it turns out, roughly
speaking, your spinning tennis ball needs to keep track of a vector along the
axis of rotation. This has something to do with the unit vectors in 2D Hilbert
space having a correspondence to the group SU(2) (where remembering only the
axis is the classical case of SO(3)). Somehow, if you were to take your
quantum spinning tennis ball and, by some mechanism (magnetic fields?), slowly
rotate its axis by 360 degrees, its spin becomes negative of what it
originally was and it can destructively interfere with a tennis ball in the
original state. Is this the sort of thing the pair of tennis balls is meant to
deal with?

Something I really don't understand is how angular momentum is meant to
work... I would have thought it's a Lie algebra thing, but SU(2) and SO(3)
have isomorphic Lie algebras.

Disclosure: I don't know any quantum mechanics, just some math.

~~~
transitionnel
Very cool, I had not seen Lie algebras before. More fuel for the organic AI
;-). Your description sounds perfectly accurate; uberdelicate electromagnetic
manipulation would be the first logical approach. ...Actually Gizmodo just did
an article on "Sycamore" a few days ago! Great read. \- Perhaps after the
microwave pulses they can get even higher resolution by shining very bright
images on it.?

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ilaksh
That's just what I need, someone to lecture me patronizingly on a field like
quantum computing which has absolutely zero practical utility at this point.

If I was going to become some kind of researcher in the field, this is still
the last thing I would want. Since I'm not a quantum computing researcher, it
doesn't matter to me.

Before someone in the thread happily starts on their own condescending
lecture, yes, I DO know that IF quantum computing becomes useful that it will
massively change computing.

~~~
rout39574
Lots of folks take joy in understanding things.

Perhaps if you toss out your bowl of cornflakes and pour it again, that funny
taste will go away.

