Recent comments from SciRate

Regarding the narrowing of the scope by adding "computational", I think that this has somehow already happened with just the original term. I've never heard anyone use the term QS in the context of, say, a Bell experiment or the classical capacity of a quantum channel.

it is not even about being directly offensive to other people, i simply can't get myself to say 'quantum supremacy', it suggests some superiority involving human beings (the whole field of QC hitting other people over the head with their 'quantum-supreme experiments').
I mean how do you read a pop

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The trouble with "quantum computational supremacy" is that the modifier "computational" may invite a narrower interpretation than I intended. For example, does it apply to sampling algorithms, or to super-classical tasks performed with analog quantum simulators? That's why I suggest "quantum ascenda

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Just my mind and the 30 other people that have commented here. If you want a quantitative argument, do an n-gram search for "{adjective} supremacy".

Ok, that's reasonable. Still, I think it is more than fair to assert that the ancilla example holds (much) less merit than the supremacy example. For one, I am willing to bet that very few people know the origins of the word ancilla (even in such a biased sample as the academic community) Indeed, I

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I don't think it matters if there is a specific oppressed group or not. The issue is simpler than that: there is just a negative connotation and we'd like to avoid it.

But who is the oppressed group here? Classical computer scientists?

Well, I have never referred to myself or any other subset of the quantum information community as simply "quantum" as this would easily lead to confusion due to the imprecise use of the word. Moreover, I have never encountered the phrase "quantum supremacy" in a situation where it had any other mea

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The issue Markus is that "{adj} supremacy", where the adjective denotes a group of people, is offensive. In the quantum computation community, we typically refer to ourselves as simply "quantum", so the bigram precisely fits this pattern. As I advocated above (see also [my blog post][1]), changing t

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Speaking of a scientific approach, the first point in my comment was to provide evidence to verify the use of the word to mean a maid, even in English, contrary to what was claimed.
However I can understand why you might have overlooked that. Secondly if what you are saying about the image search

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Until today it had not occurred to me that one could associate the phrase "quantum supremacy" with racism or racial subordination. And even after this realisation I have to insist that such an association does not make very much sense.

The word supremacy taken on its own has no meaning directly r

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Also, I am going to use my admin privileges to delete any uncivil comments here. Scirate is a venue for constructive discussion, not flame wars. See the [moderation policy][1].

[1]: https://scirate.com/moderation

"Quantum supremacy" feels so bad precisely because we use "quantum" as a synonym for our peer group. That makes the analogy to the repugnant "white supremacy" particularly close, unfortunately. If people object to "quantum advantage", then another option is "**quantum computational supremacy**", whi

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I'd first like to point out that the Google image results return such images because they are of a person with first name 'Ancilla'. Clearly, if one is looking to be offended, they will usually find something to take offense at.. On that note, perhaps we should refrain from the use of Alice? The Goo

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Hi Maria. I was suggesting the (trivially non-empty) overlap of the sets "scientists" and "people of color" is the best place to start this conversation (referring to the word 'supremacy').

This really interesting stan, are you suggesting that "we scientists" should ask "people of colour" for their opinion, assuming that the two are by assumption disjunct groups? Aren't you unintentionally proving the point that the article is making, namely that we should have a closer look at the soc

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"But the "ancilla" example is nonsensical. Firstly, "ancilla" was not "invented recently for the field of quantum information". More importantly, it has never had the meaning, or even connotation, of "female slave" in English:"

This is incorrect. Wiktionary offers two definitions for the word in

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

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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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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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

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

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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'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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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

Bravo!

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

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

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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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.

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

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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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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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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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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