Recent comments from SciRate

stan May 22 2017 16:09 UTC

Will no one speak the truth!? This is ridiculous. I can't tell if it's satire or not.

Ancillary and supreme are standard English vocabulary.
Do you know who my favorite Motown group was? THE SUPREMES.

With all respect to author, their opinion is a sample size of one. Maybe we should actuall

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Marco Piani May 22 2017 16:01 UTC

I would have understood (not necessarily agreed) if you had criticized a potential excess of political correctness; nonetheless, I do not understand how you connect this to 1984, and cite a paragraph about limited vocabulary when above there is a long discussion about the nuances of words as well as

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John Preskill May 22 2017 15:53 UTC

I don't think "advantage" captures the concept very well, for the reason others have noted -- it could mean a slight advantage rather than an overwhelming advantage.

I think "ascendancy" is pretty good. It has a similar meaning to "supremacy," without the heavy baggage, and seems less offensive t

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Marco Piani May 22 2017 14:44 UTC

To add, if one checks the use of supremacy as in "air supremacy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy):

- it makes sense to speak of "supremacy" rather than "superiority" (see
the distinction there), if we really believe quantum computers will
greatly outperform classical computers;

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Tom Wong May 22 2017 14:17 UTC

I would personally raise a strong objection to using "quantum advantage." For decades, computer scientists have been using "computational advantage" or "speed advantage" as meaning any speedup, no matter how small. Search for "advantage" in Nielsen and Chuang, for example. This appearance pre-dates

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Juani Bermejo-Vega May 22 2017 14:14 UTC

Instead of "quantum advantage" you should probably say "superpolynomial quantum computational advantage". We are talking about building a quantum experiment that appears not to be simulable in P or BPP with high confidence. If you drop "computational" then "superpolynomial quantum advantage" include

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Emma McKay May 22 2017 13:24 UTC

Thank you for this! One hopes we can acknowledge that language is at least as real as quantum computers.

Andrew W Simmons May 22 2017 12:08 UTC

Perhaps my confidence in my correction was misplaced- I was under the impression that "testis" was primarily "witness" and the other meaning came from the body part "witnessing" a certain act. I'm willing to condede that I might have been mistaken, though.

I don't know of anything else off the t

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Toby Cubitt May 22 2017 11:59 UTC

I condensed the etymology. "Testify" of course comes from "testis" (witness). Some sources suggest "testis" in turn came from "testiculo", supposedly from the Roman habit of swearing by one's testicles. Sadly, more reputable sources claim this is a myth. But as far as I know, it is true that the Lat

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Andrew W Simmons May 22 2017 10:55 UTC

I fully agree with you Toby although I think you have a bit of your etymology slightly backwards! "Testify" comes from "testis" which means witness- which I believe then became a euphemism for the word's current other meaning

James Wootton May 22 2017 10:49 UTC

There are tasks we could use quantum computers for that would be practically impossible otherwise. And there are tasks that we could do a bit faster on a quantum computer, but it would still be reasonable to use a classical one. 'advantage' could mean either of those. I think it's the absolute domin

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Earl Campbell May 22 2017 10:29 UTC

Why doesn't "advantage" mean the right thing?

Toby Cubitt May 22 2017 10:28 UTC

With "supremacy" I can at least see where the argument is coming from, even if I don't find it particularly convincing. It *is* hard to hear the word "supremacy" without also thinking of "supremacist", a word which admittedly has troubling connotations. (Or "suprematist", which has troubling connota

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James Wootton May 22 2017 10:27 UTC

'Supremity' could also be an option. It is a word, though a bit archaic. It has the same meanings, but without the baggage. It probably wouldn't be as readily understandable as 'advantage', but 'advantage' doesn't quite mean the right thing.

On the other hand, we could just say "quantum computers

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Earl Campbell May 22 2017 09:10 UTC

I think "quantum advantage" instead of "quantum supremacy" is a no-brainer. I was not aware of the objection to "ancilla". The connotations of "ancilla" are less obvious and Karoline has to dust off some Roman history to make the case for replacing "ancilla". To me, this makes the replacement of

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Christopher A. Fuchs May 15 2017 22:36 UTC

Dear Joel,

We are indeed "fielded questions like this a hundred times over." That's why I try to write some papers to allay it: It never works. Anyway, here's one example that's relevant for your queries: https://scirate.com/arxiv/1601.04360. My own view is that taking first-person elements

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Joel Klassen May 15 2017 22:01 UTC

Dear Ruediger,

Thanks for your prompt and cordial response. I hope you'll forgive the absence of address and signoff in my previous comment, my excitement got the better of my internet etiquette.

I think I understand what you are saying. The notion is that by making a statement like "a rubidiu

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Ruediger Schack May 15 2017 14:00 UTC

Dear Joel,

Thank you for this question about Fuchs's paper. As you suggest, if taken out of context, the tenet "My probabilities cannot tell nature what to do" is a little mystifying. No serious thinker should believe that *his* probabilities tell nature what to do. The actual content of the tene

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Joel Klassen May 13 2017 19:20 UTC

At the end of page 19, section 2.2 you introduce the tenet

"My Probabilities Cannot Tell Nature What To Do"

Can you elaborate on why it is necessary to include this tenet in QBism? Or more precisely, in what way is QBism unique in having this tenet? Are there any serious thinkers that are pro

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Christopher A. Fuchs May 12 2017 17:14 UTC

Dear Michel,

1. It was just a goofy thing that I thought would get the readers to smile. But Wolfgang Pauli did have quite a mystical interest in 137 precisely because of its connection to the fine structure constant. This is documented in quite a number of places; the book by Suzanne Gieser,

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Planat May 11 2017 09:03 UTC

Dear Christopher,

1. Could you comment on the connection to the fine structure constant in footnote 15 in which you write "Implicit in it is the number 137!"?

2. Would the Qbism philosophy be destroyed by restricting to IC's instead of SICs as in https://scirate.com/arxiv/1704.02749#807?

Thanks.

Lei Cui May 03 2017 09:00 UTC

what's the value for $n$ of n-grams?

Aaron May 02 2017 03:37 UTC

Bravo!

Chris Ferrie May 01 2017 12:52 UTC

I've posted a public referee report on this paper here: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/csferrie/openreviews/blob/master/arxiv.1703.10743/arxiv.1703.10743.ipynb

Thomas Klimpel Apr 20 2017 09:16 UTC

This paper [appeared][1] in February 2016 in the peer reviewed interdisciplinary journal Chaos by the American Institute of Physics (AIP).

It has been reviewed publicly by amateurs both [favorably][2] and [unfavorably][3]. The favorable review took the last sentence of the abstract ("These invalid

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Veaceslav Molodiuc Apr 19 2017 07:26 UTC

http://ibiblio.org/e-notes/Chaos/intermit.htm

Zoltán Zimborás Apr 18 2017 09:47 UTC

Great note. I real like the two end-sentences: "Of course, any given new approach to a hard and extensively studied problem has a very low probability to lead to a direct solution (some popular accounts may not have emphasized this to the degree we would have preferred). But arguably, this makes the

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James Wootton Apr 18 2017 08:29 UTC

Interesting to start getting perspectives from actual end users. But this does focus massively on quantum annealing, rather than a 'true' universal and fault-tolerant QC.

Aram Harrow Apr 17 2017 13:45 UTC

It must feel good to get this one out there! :)

Planat Apr 14 2017 08:11 UTC

First of all, thanks to all for helping to clarify some hidden points of our paper.
As you can see, the field norm generalizes the standard Hilbert-Schmidt norm.
It works for SIC [e.g. d=2, d=3 (the Hesse) and d=8 (the Hoggar)].

The first non-trivial case is with d=4 when one needs to extend th

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Robin Blume-Kohout Apr 14 2017 03:03 UTC

Okay, I see the resolution to my confusion now (and admit that I was confused). Thanks to Michel, Marcus, Blake, and Steve!

Since I don't know the first thing about cyclotomic field norms... can anybody explain the utility of this norm, for this problem? I mean, just to be extreme, I could define

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Steve Flammia Apr 13 2017 19:16 UTC

Just to clarify Michel's earlier remark, the field norm for the cyclotomics defines the norm in which these vectors are equiangular, and then they will generally **not** be equiangular in the standard norm based on the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product. In the example that he quotes,
$$\|(7\pm 3 \sqrt{

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Marcus Appleby Apr 13 2017 19:16 UTC

I worded that badly, since you clearly have explained the sense in which you are using the word. I am wondering, however, how your definition relates to the usual one. Is it a generalization? Or just plain different? For instance, would a SIC be equiangular relative to your definition (using SI

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Marcus Appleby Apr 13 2017 18:54 UTC

I am a little confused by this. As I use the term, lines are equiangular if and only if the "trace of pairwise product of (distinct) projectors is constant". You seem to be using the word in a different sense. It might be helpful if you were to explain exactly what is that sense.

Planat Apr 13 2017 16:49 UTC

To define the complex angle, we used the (cyclotomic) field norm to the power one over the degree of the field, as stated in the introduction. It recovers the particular case of angles for SICs. In this sense "equiangular" means that all pairs of distinct lines make the same angle.

Robin Blume-Kohout Apr 13 2017 15:40 UTC

This appears to be an odd and nonstandard definition of "equiangular", unless I'm missing something? Most references I'm aware of, including [Wikipedia][1] and [Renes et al 2004][2] agree that "a set of lines is called equiangular if every pair of lines makes the same angle". For unit vectors (ray

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Planat Apr 13 2017 07:14 UTC

The trace of pairwise product of (distinct) projectors is not constant. For example, with the state $(0,1,-1,-1,1)$, one gets an equiangular IC-POVM in which the trace is trivalued: it is either $1/16$, or $(7 \pm 3\sqrt{5})/32$. For the state (0,1,i,-i,-1), there are five values of the trace.
We s

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Blake Stacey Apr 12 2017 18:20 UTC

This is why I am confused (it is probably just a reading comprehension error on my part): If the POVM is IC, it must have at least $d^2$ elements. If it is a minimal IC-POVM, it must have exactly $d^2$ elements. But if it is minimal, IC and equiangular, then the angle is fixed by the requirement tha

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Planat Apr 12 2017 13:58 UTC

Yes, the IC-POVMs under consideration are minimal. The IC-POVM in dimension 5 is equiangular but is also not a SIC. In particular the trace product relation of a SIC is not satisfied. For the equiangular IC-POVM in dimension 7, we have a similar result.

Blake Stacey Apr 12 2017 00:34 UTC

Clarification request: Are all the IC-POVMs in this paper minimal? That is, does the number of elements in each POVM equal the square of the dimension? If so, I am confused about the quoted value of the inner product between projectors for the equiangular IC-POVM in dimension 5.

Mark Apr 08 2017 23:11 UTC

Hey Noon,

thanks for the feedback! I'm happy to share the code and will send it to you via mail until monday.

Robin Blume-Kohout Apr 07 2017 20:30 UTC

Zak, David: thanks! So (I think) this is a relation problem, not a decision problem (or even a partial function). Which is fine -- I'm happier with relation problems than with sampling problems, and the quantum part of Shor's algorithm is solving a relation problem, which is a pretty good pedigre

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Noon van der Silk Apr 07 2017 03:59 UTC

Nice work! Are you planning on sharing the code you wrote to run this in the IBM quantum experience system?

Jalex Stark Apr 06 2017 22:46 UTC

However, one should note that I_3322 may be able to do something that this paper doesn't. William's work leaves open the question of whether there are games with infinite-dimensional tensor product strategies but no finite-dimensional ones. Some of us might expect that I_3322 has this property.

David Gosset Apr 06 2017 20:11 UTC

Thanks Zak, that's exactly right-- for each instance there is a set of possible solutions. Like in the Bernstein-Vazirani problem, a solution is a bit string. It can't just be a single bit since then we would have the problem you describe, Robin.

Zak Webb Apr 06 2017 17:15 UTC

You are completely correct that in order to check whether a give output is "correct" for the input, we would require an additional log-depth classical circuit, but this is not how the problem is defined. In particular, for each input there is a set of "accepting" outputs, and we only need to guaran

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Robin Blume-Kohout Apr 06 2017 15:05 UTC

Is it okay to be a quantum supremacist? I thought I was, but maybe if it's "tainted" I should reconsider.

On a more serious note... a question for somebody who has read (or written) the paper. If the computation is performed on Poly(n) qubits, and all of them are relevant, and you are only allo

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Noon van der Silk Apr 06 2017 07:23 UTC

This is interesting work.

Did the authors happen to make their code available? I think there might be a few other fun experiments to run, and in particular I'd be interested to know how to use this framework for picking a network that does best at _both_ tasks (from the experiments section). That

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Steve Flammia Apr 04 2017 13:13 UTC

I would like to publicly thank the authors for using the term "advantage" instead of the tainted word "supremacy" that makes me cringe every time I hear it.

Also, great result!

Jewl Christie Apr 04 2017 13:02 UTC

Excellent!