I just watched and it was beautiful but disappointingly written. They clearly had advisors who added reasonable explanations for e.g. the different QM interpretations, simulations, determinism etc. but then ignored the implications of what they were writing a lot of the time.
SPOILER:
Like when their algorithm only worked under MWI, proving it in-world but then still having only a single branch they knew in advance they are in*, still having the determinism even with knowing the prediction of what they'll do etc.
*Except for a single decision, apparently the only decision which could result in a different outcome out of all simulated days. That single decision even broke the Algo but not even at the point where it was made and not even by just predicting a different branch from then on but predicting noise. It was just total nonsense in a show that clearly knew better at times.
I agree, I just skimmed it but the examples they used and their arguments were weak. It reads as if they haven't actually dug deep into the material they are presenting.
When they mentioned not being able to calculate double pendulum, my mind immediately jumped to concepts of computability. For instance, we know that the Halting Problem cannot be solved by a Turing machine. We (or aliens) can introduce an oracle, but that would have it's own equivalent halting problem. These are truths that have been proven.
This follows for any and all theorems. You start with a set of axioms, and then successively arrive at your proof through logical steps. Aliens might come up with new questions, new answers, etc. But that has no bearing on the validity of our mathematics.
> What really upset me was that there was practically no surrounding discussion of the intuition behind the algorithm. Behind all the rigor of mathematics lies very simple and powerful ideas. This book did nothing to emphasize those simple ideas.
I would just respond to this by saying that the mathematics do express the ideas. It's just a different language than most people are used to.
I only skimmed through it, but I can not take it seriously. They talk about general mathematical proofs, but it feels more like a few very arbitrarily chosen definitions, without addressing the most standard argument ("what is so difficult about simulating a human brain in principle, except for the (not fundamental) problem of having a big computer and precise classical measurements").
This is actually one of my principal objections. A summary of a deterministic computation requires careful thought around how it is explained so that it is interpreted as intended. That requires understanding of the domain, understanding of the semantics of the data being presented and understanding the audience.
A failure in this particular space in an observability product we use leads people wildly astray. While the data is correct, the summary is definitely not because it does not have enough understanding of the context.
Agreed. The section basically boils down to "despite maybe looking simpler, Single-Decree Paxos is still tricky." I don't think something particular and formal like Kolmogorov complexity even fits the tone there.
To me that makes it even worse
- rather than teach how something that seems magical to a non-technical person came to be, it just reinforces the idea that it’s not understandable.
I think the author didn't achieve his own goal: “Can you give me a simple, concrete explanation of how quantum computers work?”
The explanation, even though it doesn't involve any complicated math or technical stuff, is long, convoluted and full of excuses of why there can't be a simple explanation.
but the article doesn't make it sound like it's not "fully understood." the article makes it sound like not even the summary is known - for example, what parts of the other papers are used, what isn't. As though the experts didn't even known what parts of theories were being referred to. very bizarre.
I bought the book. Chapter 13 deals with 'Why Computers Can't Experience'. The author has layers and layers of theory and a very detailed discussion of the mechanics of a modern processor. But the author seems to have some fundamental inability to distinguish between layers of abstraction. That even though the fundamentals of a computer circuit are very simple, such a circuit could be used to simulate a very rich model. The author sees nowhere in the circuit where experience could happen. But the 'experience' would be within the model, not within the circuit.
This. Trying to explain why mesa-optimizers are a problem, why deception is common, and instrumental convergence harms humanity is quite complicated, and any proper explanation can't be told to a 5 year old.
I don't know of anybody who's ever learned new stuff from that book. It literally zooms from addition and subtraction to fiber bundles in a few hundred pages. That's simply not enough to pick up anything but the bare intuition, and certainly not enough to do any nontrivial calculations. The only people I know who enjoyed the book at all were those who already knew the stuff in it, but in that case the book was pointless!
Is disappointing because there is a potential for good deep thought experiments here, but when the author focuses on linear/nonlinear he sounds like he has no idea what he’s talking about and would have done better to stay at the level of metaphysics.
One of the reasons I like that series is they seem intent to do some justice to competing theories and the fact that we still don't really have a working model of the universe, or know answers as to why theories work the way they do.
Anyways this article was a really hard read for me. It's like the relatively-readable paragraphs are laughing at me--written like I should be understanding them, but I don't, ie:
>The best error-correcting codes can typically recover all of the encoded information from slightly more than half of your physical qubits, even if the rest are corrupted. This fact is what hinted to Almheiri, Dong and Harlow in 2014 that quantum error correction might be related to the way anti-de Sitter space-time arises from quantum entanglement.
I stopped reading there because frankly, if there’s such a flaw in the article that early, I was worried about the accuracy of the rest of it.
The concept is just not explained at all. I spent too long making sure I didn’t miss some sentence somewhere explaining what was happening in that diagram. It felt like the article was wasting my time, and that maybe the author himself didn’t really understand what was happening.
SPOILER:
Like when their algorithm only worked under MWI, proving it in-world but then still having only a single branch they knew in advance they are in*, still having the determinism even with knowing the prediction of what they'll do etc.
*Except for a single decision, apparently the only decision which could result in a different outcome out of all simulated days. That single decision even broke the Algo but not even at the point where it was made and not even by just predicting a different branch from then on but predicting noise. It was just total nonsense in a show that clearly knew better at times.
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