

Scott Aaronson, from computational complexity to quantum mechanics - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/ingenious-scott-aaronson

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jerf
Another science fiction story where P=NP by Charles Stross:
[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/toast/to...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/toast/toast.html#antibodies)

(Put up by the author, so this is not piracy.)

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ttctciyf
I was a bit taken aback to read that P/NP equality would imply we could
compute: "What is the shortest program that in a small amount of time will
output the complete works of Shakespeare." since I thought it was proven that
determining that some program was the shortest program with a specific output
is in general non-computable (relative to some set of axioms, only a finite
number of programs are provably the shortest ones producing their outputs.)

Maybe the catch here is the "in a small amount of time"? Or maybe I
misunderstood something about Chaitin's "elegant program" idea (where the
elegant program for some string S is the shortest one producting S as
output.[1])?

I'd be interested in any resolution of this, since it seems unlikely Mr
Aaronson would be making a mistake on this topic!

[1]
[http://www.academia.edu/5838116/Is_incompleteness_a_serious_...](http://www.academia.edu/5838116/Is_incompleteness_a_serious_problem)

~~~
emmab
The term is "time-bound kolmogorov complexity".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity)

It's a reference to time-bound solomonoff induction:
[http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability)

edit: also see [http://math.uni-
heidelberg.de/logic/merkle/ps/mfcs-2009.pdf](http://math.uni-
heidelberg.de/logic/merkle/ps/mfcs-2009.pdf)

~~~
ttctciyf
Thanks (and other repliers) for the links. I've some reading to do..

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vecter
This is a relevant lecture of his which goes into more depth about how to
teach QM as a probability theory over complex variables:
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html](http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html)

When I read this, I thought it made so much sense.

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diego898
another great interview! I really enjoy all of nautil.us articles and am very
happy Scott did one. I of course recommend all of Scotts essays, including
"Why philosophers should care about computational complexity theory" [1] that
was submitted to HN recently with some great discussion.

Also, I highly recommend another one of their ingengious series: David Deutsch
[2]

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061744](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061744)
[2]: [http://nautil.us/issue/2/uncertainty/ingenious-david-
deutsch](http://nautil.us/issue/2/uncertainty/ingenious-david-deutsch)

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arvinjoar
I've got so much respect for Nautilus for their choice of content, they seem
to make things that might seem hard quite approachable without dumbing it
down.

Off-topic: Their choice of navigation design for this multi-video interview
was horrible. I don't know if there's some esoteric knowledge I lack that
would have made the navigation more usable, but this is what I ended up doing:
[http://i.imgur.com/e4nWbzZ.gif](http://i.imgur.com/e4nWbzZ.gif)

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davesque
One of my favorite writers and thinkers. Thanks for posting this.

