> colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct
Profound stuff. I've also heard it said that if P is a proposition then either P is true or P is false. But I've never been one to make such sweeping claims myself.
If what you say were true then patents would be kept secret until expiry. Patents are made public when they are granted (before, in fact) so that people can (1) improve on old inventions (which may require the inventor to license the old invention before it can be implemented) and (2) learn about the state of the art so as to invent things 'around' current inventions.
It's the electronic equivalent of using soap bubbles to solve the traveling salesman problem. For simple problems you really can use soap bubbles because soap bubbles like to form minimal surfaces. This 'quantum' computer does something similar - it uses a form of annealing to find the minimum of some function with the energy representing the function you're trying to minimise. Cool the system and you find what that minimum energy is. But soap bubbles don't scale.
So the first part of the scam is this: even if this device wasn't a quantum device at all it would still work to some extent because when you allow systems to cool they fall into lower energy states. If the 'quantum' aspect of things works then it might find that state faster, but without careful monitoring there's no way of telling if the 'quantumness' had anything to do with what it did. In fact, for large systems we know that it won't be very 'quantum' at all because it will interact with its environment and decohere. But it's a perfect strategy for designing a machine that you can claim is quantum, when it isn't. It stinks of scam.
Secondly: suppose you want to solve a challenging problem with this device. For example you want to search some space for a miniumum of some sort. For this machine to be effective the state space must be pretty large or else you could use a regular classical computer. Consider a billion state problem (quite small really for combinatorial problems). You have to be able to get a system to settle into the minimum energy state despite the fact that there are a billion states nearby all of which have almost the same energy. Just the tiniest input of energy and it'll jump up from that minimum. There is absolutely no way that they can search a large enough state space and still have the minimum energy state sufficiently far from other states.
BTW This device is quite different from what is conventionally meant by a 'quantum computer', it's more like a quantum, analog computer.
Real and useful 'digital' quantum computers are a long way off. I expect that the size of quantum computers will grow by a bit or so per year at the most. (When I say 'bit' I mean total memory, not the size of the bus.)
The whole point of a patent is that you tell the world how your invention works in exchange for a monopoly on that invention. The 'engine' part comes from the fact that anyone can read a patent for idea and then develop innovative improvements based on it. So patents provide a mechanism for driving continual innovation. But to quote Borat: naaaat!
The moment you work for a company that develops inventions and you meet their IP lawyer they tell you "if we knowingly violate someone else's patent then we're fined three times as much as if we didn't know. So under no circumstances read anyone else's patents.". So the whole thing is a complete scam and everyone involved is complicit. How come it needs a professor to say what everyone who works in IP has always known?
"Origin of Species" is ambiguous. It could mean the origin of individual species, or it could mean the origin of all species, ie. the origin of life. I believe Darwin intended the former meaning.
I only agree if by "natural selection" you're talking about large scale statistical trends rather than individual events. Gould makes a strong case for the contingency of natural selection in many of his books. An obvious example is a perfectly fit seeming species that's wiped out by a meteorite impact.
Of course it's random. Being able to run faster makes the odds of you outrunning that predator better, but whether or not you actually do outrun it is still a matter of chance.
People who say "Natural selection is not random" have already lost to the creationists. Creationists set up a false dichotomy between random and 'intelligently' directed. It's a false dichotomy because random events can seem directed. A simple example is Boyle's law for the pressure of a gas: PV = k. It's as good a physical law as they come. But the motion of the individual molecules making up that gas is random. The same goes for evolution by natural selection. We can have countless random events taking place and yet still see emergent phenomena displaying order.
Example: someone came in to me at work and asks me to solve problem X. Just at that moment I was reading a paper on how to solve problem Y in a completely different domain. But then I realised problem Y is algorithmically same as problem X, even though they're apparently papers about different fields. What in incredible stroke of luck, I could just implement something straight out of the paper. I had no idea someone was going to ask me to solve problem X when I started reading the paper. I was incredibly lucky. Not only did I solve the problem, the solution was novel and is now patented.
I like to read random papers on subjects that don't obviously relate to my work. Obviously someone who doesn't read such papers isn't likely to have the same stroke of luck. So the luck is, to some extent, of my own making.
That's what I mean by "making my own luck". It doesn't seem too different from this cancer related discovery. If you do research in a field, and keep your eyes open, you're much more likely to make a serendipitous discovery in that field than someone who doesn't do research in that field.
I thought it was just a truism when people say "you make your own luck" but when I read comments like this I realise that it has non-trivial information after all.
Check out the book "Metaphors We Live By" by Lakoff and Johnson. I think it's the main influence that shaped my views on metaphors, and in particular it discusses how systematic they are. (I say "I think" as I read it 20 years ago.)
A simile depends on having a kind of mapping between one domain and another. These allow you to use reasoning from one domain to reason in another. That's why they're so useful - by using such a mapping, people inexperienced in one domain can still reason in it by leveraging their experience in another. For example, when Shakespeare says "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" he points out that some of our reasoning about summer's days can be applied to people too. For example, just as many people are disappointed when we know there will be no more summer's days as autumn approaches, we know that Shakespeare would be disappointed if separated from the subject of his sonnet for an extended period of time. We know this even though he doesn't say it explicitly because he has set up a mapping that allows us to reason about his subject.
Sometimes the mapping is a direct translation. For example if someone says that detecting a pulsar with a new radio telescope is like seeing a candle on the moon we can guess that maybe the power being received from the pulsar is the same as the power received from a candle on the moon. Sometimes it's a scaling. For example if someone says that a flea's jump is like a human jumping over the Empire State building we guess that if we were to scale a human down to the size of a flea, then applying the same scaling to the said building would reduce it to the height of a flea's jump.
So now I can say what my complaint about this simile is. It gives no idea what the mapping is. Actually, it's worse, I can partly see what the mapping is, but the concepts I use to do this aren't in the grasp of the very people it is designed to help. But even in this case it's only a partial understanding. I don't know if the energy of the car is meant to be literally the same energy as that of the particle. I don't know if the 250ft is meant to be taken literally. And the stupid thing is that ordinary people have no intuition about the energy stored in a non-relativistic moving object, let alone a relativistic one. So most people are probably inclined to try to set up an interpretation of the mapping in terms of the car's velocity - and that's the wrong mapping.
Imagine a car that accelerates from zero to sixty in 250 feet, and then rockets to 120 miles per hour in just one more inch. That's essentially what a collaboration of accelerator physicists has accomplished
No it isn't.
(I feel that in a public forum like this it's reasonable for people to call upon me to justify my statements. But this statement is so completely ridiculous that I hardly even know where to start justifying myself.)
If you actually listen to the music we're talking about over the past 100 years...
Not sure what I'm supposed to be comparing with from 100 years ago. If you're talking about popular folk music then frankly large amounts of it was crap. Just endless recyclings of the previous popular folk song with very little variety and innovation. If you're talking about classical music then I don't think you can make a reasonable comparison with popular music today as these types of music are serving very different needs. Maybe you don't mean 100 years. Maybe you mean 50 years. Maybe it doesn't affect you but it makes me want to scream when I hear the same cliche chord progression yet again from yet another song from the 50s or 60s. I'm not saying that the most popular music of today has any great virtue. Just that there was plenty of crap from the days of yore. And today there is so much variety on offer, and simply so much music on offer, that among all the crap there are plenty of gems for everyone to find for themselves.
You don't just patent a gene. You patent a particular application. In particular, you're only in legal trouble if your gene was patented as an invention for killing people.
Their record sales plummeted because the music they're selling sucks
This explanation only has explanatory power if the suckiness of music has increased in parallel with sales plummeting. Seeing as I've heard the same refrain about contemporary music sucking almost continuously since I first heard my parents saying it when I was a kid 30 years ago I don't see any evidence that this is true.
Ever since the Rolling Stones were created as a "bad boy" alternative to the Beatles the studios have been manufacturing bands.
Actually, there are some people who might want to use virtual OSX on OSX. Apple could sell these customers multiple licenses of OSX and so it would be in their interest to allow this.
Unless I'm playing in the same room as the person I'm playing against, I lose the emotional and physical connection that makes multiplayer games fun.
This argument is about one step up from "I don't like coffee therefore coffee should be made illegal". Who cares what emotional problems this author has, there are millions of people who don't share them.
After all, it has an editing process which means that editors can edit the story to give a useful context and make things clear for the wide audience they have. Of course in this case there was no need for editing as the story was perfectly clear, and anyway, everyone already knows AV=audio-visual.
nobody is honest enough to be trusted to erase all traces of a downloaded song they wanted to return
When I sell CDs I delete the rips I made of them. I'm not super-assiduous about it, so there may be one or two albums I missed, but I'm sure I;m not the only such person.
I wish people would stop using 'faith' this way, it's a recent innovation and it's very misleading.
Clearly we can't prove everything we believe. Even mathematics is founded on unproved axioms. But it's not an act of faith to adopt a set of axioms. Even in Mathematics I certainly don't adopt the axioms unquestioningly in that I believe it's possible that the axioms of mathematics lead to a contradiction (after all, this problem has already arisen at least once in mathematics with Russell's paradox).
My scheme involves offering a prize to anyone who can invent a system that can remove a billion tons of CO2 from the air each year without any adverse effect on the environment. To encourage the smartest people I'd probably set the prize level pretty high, say at $24,000,000, paid out in installements.
Now, where do I go to collect my $25,000,000 (in installments)?
The existence of quantum computers with similar gate counts and clock speeds to current classical computers would force people to double the size of their keys. On the other hand, a 10 times increase (say) in the speed of classical computers would force a small incremental change to the size of key required. And yet you say that: "a quantum computer is not a big help for cracking symmetric ciphers". You need to recalibrate your use of the word 'big'.
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> colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct Profound stuff. I've also heard it said that if P is a proposition then either P is true or P is false. But I've never been one to make such sweeping claims myself.
If what you say were true then patents would be kept secret until expiry. Patents are made public when they are granted (before, in fact) so that people can (1) improve on old inventions (which may require the inventor to license the old invention before it can be implemented) and (2) learn about the state of the art so as to invent things 'around' current inventions.
So the first part of the scam is this: even if this device wasn't a quantum device at all it would still work to some extent because when you allow systems to cool they fall into lower energy states. If the 'quantum' aspect of things works then it might find that state faster, but without careful monitoring there's no way of telling if the 'quantumness' had anything to do with what it did. In fact, for large systems we know that it won't be very 'quantum' at all because it will interact with its environment and decohere. But it's a perfect strategy for designing a machine that you can claim is quantum, when it isn't. It stinks of scam.
Secondly: suppose you want to solve a challenging problem with this device. For example you want to search some space for a miniumum of some sort. For this machine to be effective the state space must be pretty large or else you could use a regular classical computer. Consider a billion state problem (quite small really for combinatorial problems). You have to be able to get a system to settle into the minimum energy state despite the fact that there are a billion states nearby all of which have almost the same energy. Just the tiniest input of energy and it'll jump up from that minimum. There is absolutely no way that they can search a large enough state space and still have the minimum energy state sufficiently far from other states.
BTW This device is quite different from what is conventionally meant by a 'quantum computer', it's more like a quantum, analog computer.
Real and useful 'digital' quantum computers are a long way off. I expect that the size of quantum computers will grow by a bit or so per year at the most. (When I say 'bit' I mean total memory, not the size of the bus.)
The moment you work for a company that develops inventions and you meet their IP lawyer they tell you "if we knowingly violate someone else's patent then we're fined three times as much as if we didn't know. So under no circumstances read anyone else's patents.". So the whole thing is a complete scam and everyone involved is complicit. How come it needs a professor to say what everyone who works in IP has always known?
"Origin of Species" is ambiguous. It could mean the origin of individual species, or it could mean the origin of all species, ie. the origin of life. I believe Darwin intended the former meaning.
If I hadn't just read the xkcd about God and lisp that Fixed Earth web site would have been the funniest thing I'd read all morning.
I only agree if by "natural selection" you're talking about large scale statistical trends rather than individual events. Gould makes a strong case for the contingency of natural selection in many of his books. An obvious example is a perfectly fit seeming species that's wiped out by a meteorite impact.
People who say "Natural selection is not random" have already lost to the creationists. Creationists set up a false dichotomy between random and 'intelligently' directed. It's a false dichotomy because random events can seem directed. A simple example is Boyle's law for the pressure of a gas: PV = k. It's as good a physical law as they come. But the motion of the individual molecules making up that gas is random. The same goes for evolution by natural selection. We can have countless random events taking place and yet still see emergent phenomena displaying order.
I like to read random papers on subjects that don't obviously relate to my work. Obviously someone who doesn't read such papers isn't likely to have the same stroke of luck. So the luck is, to some extent, of my own making.
That's what I mean by "making my own luck". It doesn't seem too different from this cancer related discovery. If you do research in a field, and keep your eyes open, you're much more likely to make a serendipitous discovery in that field than someone who doesn't do research in that field.
I thought it was just a truism when people say "you make your own luck" but when I read comments like this I realise that it has non-trivial information after all.
Check out the book "Metaphors We Live By" by Lakoff and Johnson. I think it's the main influence that shaped my views on metaphors, and in particular it discusses how systematic they are. (I say "I think" as I read it 20 years ago.)
A simile depends on having a kind of mapping between one domain and another. These allow you to use reasoning from one domain to reason in another. That's why they're so useful - by using such a mapping, people inexperienced in one domain can still reason in it by leveraging their experience in another. For example, when Shakespeare says "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" he points out that some of our reasoning about summer's days can be applied to people too. For example, just as many people are disappointed when we know there will be no more summer's days as autumn approaches, we know that Shakespeare would be disappointed if separated from the subject of his sonnet for an extended period of time. We know this even though he doesn't say it explicitly because he has set up a mapping that allows us to reason about his subject.
Sometimes the mapping is a direct translation. For example if someone says that detecting a pulsar with a new radio telescope is like seeing a candle on the moon we can guess that maybe the power being received from the pulsar is the same as the power received from a candle on the moon. Sometimes it's a scaling. For example if someone says that a flea's jump is like a human jumping over the Empire State building we guess that if we were to scale a human down to the size of a flea, then applying the same scaling to the said building would reduce it to the height of a flea's jump.
So now I can say what my complaint about this simile is. It gives no idea what the mapping is. Actually, it's worse, I can partly see what the mapping is, but the concepts I use to do this aren't in the grasp of the very people it is designed to help. But even in this case it's only a partial understanding. I don't know if the energy of the car is meant to be literally the same energy as that of the particle. I don't know if the 250ft is meant to be taken literally. And the stupid thing is that ordinary people have no intuition about the energy stored in a non-relativistic moving object, let alone a relativistic one. So most people are probably inclined to try to set up an interpretation of the mapping in terms of the car's velocity - and that's the wrong mapping.
(I feel that in a public forum like this it's reasonable for people to call upon me to justify my statements. But this statement is so completely ridiculous that I hardly even know where to start justifying myself.)
You don't just patent a gene. You patent a particular application. In particular, you're only in legal trouble if your gene was patented as an invention for killing people.
Ever since the Rolling Stones were created as a "bad boy" alternative to the Beatles the studios have been manufacturing bands.
Actually, there are some people who might want to use virtual OSX on OSX. Apple could sell these customers multiple licenses of OSX and so it would be in their interest to allow this.
After all, it has an editing process which means that editors can edit the story to give a useful context and make things clear for the wide audience they have. Of course in this case there was no need for editing as the story was perfectly clear, and anyway, everyone already knows AV=audio-visual.
Clearly we can't prove everything we believe. Even mathematics is founded on unproved axioms. But it's not an act of faith to adopt a set of axioms. Even in Mathematics I certainly don't adopt the axioms unquestioningly in that I believe it's possible that the axioms of mathematics lead to a contradiction (after all, this problem has already arisen at least once in mathematics with Russell's paradox).
..."the terrorists have won".
My scheme involves offering a prize to anyone who can invent a system that can remove a billion tons of CO2 from the air each year without any adverse effect on the environment. To encourage the smartest people I'd probably set the prize level pretty high, say at $24,000,000, paid out in installements. Now, where do I go to collect my $25,000,000 (in installments)?
Did your old D&D rule books suddenly self-destruct or something? You can play by the old rules all you want.
The existence of quantum computers with similar gate counts and clock speeds to current classical computers would force people to double the size of their keys. On the other hand, a 10 times increase (say) in the speed of classical computers would force a small incremental change to the size of key required. And yet you say that: "a quantum computer is not a big help for cracking symmetric ciphers". You need to recalibrate your use of the word 'big'.