Archive for the ‘Speaking Truth to Parallelism’ Category

Quantum Computing Since Democritus Lecture 13: How Big Are Quantum States?

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

A year and a half after the actual course, the remaining Democritus lecture notes are finally being transcribed and posted — thanks to my new summer student, Chris Granade. In Lecture 13, you can read about why QMA, QCMA, and BQP/qpoly are not merely complexity classes but battlefields, where competing visions of what quantum states really are face each other off in conflicts that we as theorists intentionally provoked. (Work with me here.)

Scientific American article is out!

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

After three years of procrastination and delays, my 8-page feature article on “The Limits of Quantum Computers” has finally appeared in the March issue of Scientific American. Once I get permission, I’ll post a plain-text version on my website. In the meantime, you can buy the online issue for US$5.00 from SciAm‘s website, in which case you get colorful sidebars and graphics (including a bearded, white-lab-coated cartoon scientist holding quantum computers and complexity class inclusion diagrams), as well as an interview with Jeff Kimble about the unfortunate movie “Jumper”, and other articles about “the end of cosmology”, prediction markets (Robin Hanson and his “futarchy” get a mention), and the disastrous overfishing of the bluefin tuna (the kind used for toro sushi). Update (2/18): By popular demand, I’m posting a rough early draft (PDF) of my article online. Read at your own risk! So, what was it like to write for Scientific American? Exhausting, excruciating, and ultimately worth it. As a general rule, SciAm (probably like all large-circulation magazines) rewrites articles so extensively that the person listed in the byline is less the “writer” than the “content consultant.” Almost every sentence in my article bears the scars of battle (some that I won, more that I didn’t). Yet I have to concede that, when something was really cringe-inducingly wrong, SciAm was willing to listen and make changes — and besides, they did a great job with the cartoons. I’m happy with the end result. Thanks to George Musser, the editor who solicited the article and gave me lots of feedback in the early stages, and to Graham Collins, who finally saw it into print. A few specific comments for your amusement: • In an earlier draft, the cartoons adorning my article were “all balding white guy, all the time” (supposedly, because of the need to keep a “consistent character” throughout the article). I demanded some sort of cartoon-diversity. After a heated discussion among the editors — in which, I’m told, the name of Larry Summers was invoked — they finally agreed to add a cartoon black woman. To those who think I’m a male chauvinist pig: how many brownie points do I get? • No, the crystal ball with floating ψ’s and φ’s, mounted atop a keyboard, is not an accurate depiction of what a quantum computer would look like. Having toured some actual QC labs, though, I had to admit it worked better graphically than a lab table piled high with tinfoil, lasers, and assorted pipes. • The topic label of the article is “Information Technology.” I pleaded with them to change the topic to “Computer Science,” but to no avail. Apparently the problem was that in the table of contents, the previous two articles were labeled “Prediction Science” and “Brain Science.” • The complexity class inclusion diagram on page 67 was a key concession I did win. (Apparently some editors felt a Venn diagram with P, NP, BQP, and PSPACE would be way too complicated, even for readers who regularly gobble down heaping helpings of M-theory.) As you can imagine, exposing people to this stuff seemed pretty important to me: this is apparently the first time P, NP, and NP-completeness have been explained at any length in Scientific American since articles by Knuth and by Lewis and Papadimitriou in the 1970′s. • In the author bio on page 67, the description of me as a “high school dropout” is a slight exaggeration, but there’s no other short term for what I am (see here for more). • I had nothing to do with the sidebar on page 68, about Vernor Vinge’s novel A Fire Upon the Deep. I’ve never read that (or anything else by Vinge for that matter). • My original draft included explanations of both the polynomial and adversary methods for quantum lower bounds, with references to BBCMdW and Ambainis. Shockingly, all of that was cut, while the part about time machines was greatly expanded. During the hairiest parts of editing process, I was reminded of a passage in Anita and Solomon Feferman’s biography of the great logician Alfred Tarski, which described Tarski’s writing of an article for Scientific American (the only popular article he ever wrote). Usually the Scientific American articles are heavily edited; many are rewriteen and some even ghostwritten, but Wisnovsky [Tarski's editor] knew better than to tamper with Tarski’s work and did not — except for his usage of ‘which’ and ‘that’. It seemed to him that Tarski did a 180-degree reversal of these words, so he changed every ‘which’ to ‘that’ and every ‘that’ to ‘which’ and sent the proofs to Tarski, who changed everything back to the way it had been. Wisnovsky got out Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, the house bible, and called Tarski on the telephone. “I asked if I could read him the relevant passage on ‘that’ and ‘which’ and he said, ‘yes’. It goes on for pages, but he listened very patiently until I finished. Then he said, ‘Well, you see, that is Fowler. I am Tarski.’ The minute he said that I caved in. I felt cut off at the knees and I gave up trying to make any changes at all.” Yet, while the “Tarski approach” to magazine writing is a tempting one, here’s the final irony. I looked up Tarski’s actual article from 1969, and it badly needed an editor. Geordie Rose at MIT Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 While there are many, many things in this world that I’m bent on destroying, D-Wave Systems has never been one of them. Ideally, I’d simply let the D-Wave folks do their thing (namely, try to build an adiabatic quantum computer) while I do my thing (namely, study the fundamental limits of quantum computers). It was only when, in connection with D-Wave, cringe-worthy claims about quantum computing started appearing all over the press that I felt a professional obligation to say something. Now that I’m “involved,” though, I also need to keep you ablog of any notable further developments. And presumably, D-Wave founder Geordie Rose coming to MIT to meet with our quantum information group counts as notable. Two months ago, you’ll recall, we were graced by a visit from D-Wave’s Mohammad Amin and Andrew Berkley, but I’d never before had the pleasure of meeting Geordie. At least formally, the reason for his visit was not to defend D-Wave, but to present “four hard problems” for us to solve. These problems were as follows: 1. Find a practical adiabatic factoring algorithm. Because of the equivalence of adiabatic and standard quantum computing, we know that such an algorithm exists, but the running time you get from applying the reduction is something like O(n11). Geordie asks for an O(n3) factoring algorithm in the adiabatic model. It was generally agreed (with one dissent, from Geordie) that reducing factoring to a 3SAT instance, and then throwing a generic adiabatic optimization algorithm at the result, would be a really, really bad approach to this problem. 2. Find a fault-tolerance threshold for adiabatic quantum computing, similar to the known threshold in the circuit model. Geordie asserted that such a threshold has to exist, because of the equivalence of adiabatic and standard quantum computing. However, others immediately pointed out that this is not so: the equivalence theorem is not known to be “fault-tolerance-preserving.” This is a major open problem that many people have worked on without success. 3. Prove upper and lower bounds on the adiabatic algorithm’s performance in finding exact solutions to hard optimization problems. 4. Prove upper and lower bounds on its performance in finding approximate solutions to such problems. (Ed Farhi described 3 and 4 as “so much harder than anything else we’ve failed to solve.”) While none of these problems are new to the quantum computing community, they’re all extremely good ones, and all (indeed) extremely hard. Of course, we did also discuss some controversial, red-meat, “did-D-Wave-build-a-quantum-computer” sorts of questions, so I owe it to you to provide a few highlights from that discussion. Seth Lloyd, who’s been more sympathetic to D-Wave than most of us, correctly pointed out that D-Wave has a “credibility problem in the scientific community.” He discussed in great detail the experiments D-Wave ought to be doing to convince scientists that they’re really seeing quantum effects. I strongly agreed with Seth, adding that I’d rather see two coherent qubits than thousands of incoherent ones. Of course, even if D-Wave could demonstrate two-qubit entanglement (and Geordie says it’s the “next thing on the list”), there would still remain the enormous issues of scalability and of the limitations of the adiabatic algorithm in solving hard optimization problems. But at least we could be more comfortable in saying that what they currently have is a tiny quantum computer. Geordie conceded that, so far, D-Wave has no direct evidence for entanglement among two or more qubits. He nevertheless argued that they have indirect evidence (basically, that their data are better fit by a simple quantum model than a simple classical one), and that the lack of direct evidence is solely due to the difficulty of performing the requisite measurements. Seth replied that, despite the difficulty, D-Wave would “do itself a big favor” by performing the measurements. Seth also mentioned D-Wave’s claims to the popular press — for example, about the ability of quantum computers to solve NP-complete problems — as a major factor in its scientific credibility problem. Geordie admitted that some of D-Wave’s publicity was (here he paused for a few seconds) “not inaccurate, but verging on inaccurate.” Note: Geordie now says that he was only talking about the reporting on D-Wave; in his words, “I stand by 100% anything I’ve ever said to anyone about these machines.” At the time, I understood him quite clearly to be talking about D-Wave’s own publicity; it’s strange that he would have hesitated to admit that reporters have misunderstood things. But I freely admit that I might have misheard or misinterpreted him. I asked Geordie about the result of Bansal, Bravyi, and Terhal that the planar Ising spin graph problem admits an efficient classical approximation algorithm — thus calling into question D-Wave’s whole strategy of solving other NP approximation problems by mapping them onto Ising spin graph instances. Geordie replied, first, that their machine can handle many non-planar links, and second, that Bansal et al.’s algorithm merely trades an exponential dependence on n for an exponential dependence on 1/ε. I agreed that their algorithm isn’t practical, but argued that its mere existence would have to be dealt with in any attempt to convert approximate solutions of the Ising spin graph problem into approximate solutions of the original optimization problems. So, where do we stand? Here’s my attempt at a fair summary: • The people at D-Wave are not conscious frauds; they genuinely believe in what they’re doing. • On the other hand, much of the publicity surrounding D-Wave can be safely rejected. To some academics, even one or two public misrepresentations are enough to destroy a company’s credibility. Others, however, prefer to ignore press releases — seeing hype, exaggeration, and even outright falsehoods as just a necessary part of raising money — and to concentrate solely on a company’s communications with experts. Where you fall between these extremes probably depends on your personality more than anything else. • In the past, I criticized D-Wave (rightly, I think) for failing to share information with the scientific community in a good-faith manner. To their credit, they’re now making more of an effort to communicate. • Thus far, by Geordie’s own account, there’s no direct evidence that D-Wave’s machine actually produces entanglement at any stage of its operation (which all agree is a non-negotiable requirement for quantum computing). Geordie says that producing such evidence will be the “next thing on the list.” The Sudoku stunt was worthless from a scientific perspective; it did not answer any of the questions that physicists need answered. • Even if D-Wave managed to build (say) a coherent 1,024-qubit machine satisfying all of its design specs, it’s not obvious it would outperform a classical computer on any problem of practical interest. This is true both because of the inherent limitations of the adiabatic algorithm, and because of specific concerns about the Ising spin graph problem. On the other hand, it’s also not obvious that such a machine wouldn’t outperform a classical computer on some practical problems. The experiment would be an interesting one! Of course, this uncertainty — combined with the more immediate uncertainties about whether D-Wave can build such a machine at all, and indeed, about whether they can even produce two-qubit entanglement — also means that any talk of “lining up customers” is comically premature. Thanksgiving Special: D-Wave at MIT Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 Some people think I have a vendetta against D-Wave Systems and its questionable quantum computer claims (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here for context). But actually, nothing could be further from the truth. I keep trying and trying to change the subject! Wouldn’t you all rather hear about Wolfram, I say? Or unparadoxes? Or my #1 topic du jour, nothing whatsoever? Apparently you wouldn’t. From my inbox to my comments section to the hallway, the masses have spoken, and what they want to know is: did I attend D-Wave’s presentation at MIT on Monday, and if so what did I think? Yes, I attended, in body though not in mind. You see, Monday was also the day of the STOC deadline, so if our guests from D-Wave (Mohammad Amin and Andrew Berkley) were expecting a ferocious skeptic, they instead got a bleary-eyed zombie with visions of MAEXP, P/poly, and 7:59PM EST cavorting in his head. This meant that Ed Farhi, Isaac Chuang, Peter Shor, and Lorenza Viola had to do most of the questioning. As it turned out, they did a vastly better job than I could have. As others have pointed out in stronger terms, I’m not a physicist. (On the other hand, the gentleman linked to in the previous sentence is not correct about my being paid by the NSA to discredit Canadian quantum computing efforts: it’s actually the GCHQ and the Mossad.) As such, I can’t directly evaluate D-Wave’s central claim to have built an adiabatic quantum computer, nor have I ever tried to do so. All I can do is point out the many things D-Wave has said to the press (about NP-complete problems, for example) that I know are false, its history of making dramatic announcements without evidence, and its contemptuous attitude toward scientists who have asked for such evidence. For me, that’s more than enough to destroy D-Wave’s credibility on the claims I can’t directly evaluate. After all, the burden of proof is not on me; it’s on them. However, other people have not been satisfied with this line of argument. “We don’t care who the burden the proof is on,” they say. “We just care whether D-Wave built an adiabatic quantum computer.” But my physicist colleagues don’t suffer from the same argumentative limitations that I do. At the group meeting preceding the talk, Farhi announced that he didn’t care what the press releases said, nor did he want to discuss what problems quantum computers can solve (since we academics can figure that out ourselves). Instead he wanted to focus on a single question: is D-Wave’s device a quantum computer or not? What followed was probably the most intense grilling of an invited speaker I’ve ever seen. It quickly emerged that D-Wave wants to run a coherent quantum computation for microseconds, even though each of their superconducting qubits will have completely decohered within nanoseconds. Farhi had to ask Amin to repeat this several times, to make sure he’d gotten it right. Amin’s claim was that what looks like total decoherence in the computational basis is irrelevant — since for adiabatic quantum computation, all that matters is what happens in the basis of energy eigenstates. In particular, Amin claimed to have numerical simulations showing that, if the temperature is smaller than the spectral gap, then one can do adiabatic quantum computation even if the conventional coherence times (the t1 and t2) would manifestly seem to prohibit it. The physicists questioned Amin relentlessly on this one claim. I think it’s fair to say that they emerged curious but severely skeptical, not at all convinced by the calculations Amin provided, and determined to study the issue for themselves. In other words, this was science as it should be. In contrast to their bosses, Amin and Berkley made a genuine effort to answer questions. They basically admitted that D-Wave’s press releases were litanies of hype and exaggeration, but nevertheless thought they had a promising path to a quantum computer. On several occasions, they seemed to be struggling to give an honest answer that would still uphold the company line. Two other highlights: • I asked Amin and Berkley whether they could give any evidence for any sort of speedup over classical simulated annealing. They laughed at this. “It’s sixteen qubits!” they said. “Of course you’re not going to see a scaling effect with sixteen qubits.”I said I understood perfectly well (though I wondered silently whether the dozens of journalists covering D-Wave’s demo understood the same). But, I continued, surely you should be able to see a scaling effect by the end of 2008, when your business plan calls for 1024 qubits?”Well, that’s what it says in the press release,” they said. Forget about the press release, Farhi interjected. How many qubits are you actually going to make? Amin and Berkley shrugged; they said they’d just try to make as many qubits as they could. • Even though it hadn’t exhibited any sort of speedup, Amin and Berkley steadfastly maintained that their 16-qubit device was indeed a quantum computer. Their evidence was that simulations of its behavior that took quantum mechanics into account gave, they said, a better fit to the data than simulations that didn’t. On the other hand, they said they were not able to test directly for the presence of any quantum effect such as entanglement. (They agreed that entanglement was a non-negotiable requirement for quantum computing.)There was a Feynmanesque moment, when Ike Chuang asked Amin and Berkley an experimental question so simple even I understood it. Ike said: if you’re indeed seeing quantum effects, then by running your computer at higher and higher temperatures, at some point you should see a transition to classical behavior. Have you tried this simple control experiment?Amin and Berkley said that they hadn’t, but that it sounded like a good idea. For a theorist like me — accustomed to talks ending with “if there are no questions, then let’s thank the speaker again” — this was exciting, heady stuff. And when it was over, I still had almost three hours until the STOC deadline. University takes unfortunate stance on existence of quantum algorithm Friday, October 26th, 2007 The homepage of Bristol University now prominently features a photograph with the words “NP ⊂ BQP, but the proof is too small to fit on this blackboard.” Hat tip to Aram Harrow, who’s also the apparent culprit behind this embarrassment to his employer. What Google Won’t Find Friday, August 31st, 2007 While I rummage around the brain for something more controversial to blog (that’s nevertheless not too controversial), here, for your reading pleasure, is a talk I gave a couple weeks ago at Google Cambridge. Hardcore Shtetl-Optimized fans will find little here to surprise them, but for new or occasional readers, this is about the clearest statement I’ve written of my religio-ethico-complexity-theoretic beliefs. What Google Won’t Find As I probably mentioned when I spoke at your Mountain View location two years ago, it’s a funny feeling when an entity that knows everything that ever can be known or has been known or will be known invites you to give a talk — what are you supposed to say? Well, I thought I’d talk about “What Google Won’t Find.” In other words, what have we learned over the last 15 years or so about the ultimate physical limits of search — whether it’s search of a physical database like Google’s, or of the more abstract space of solutions to a combinatorial problem? On the spectrum of computer science, I’m about as theoretical as you can get. One way to put it is that I got through CS grad school at Berkeley without really learning any programming language other than QBASIC. So it might surprise you that earlier this year, I was spending much of my time talking to business reporters. Why? Because there was this company near Vancouver called D-Wave Systems, which was announcing to the press that it had built the world’s first commercial quantum computer. Let’s ignore the “commercial” part, because I don’t really understand economics — these days, you can apparently make billions of dollars giving away some service for free! Let’s instead focus on the question: did D-Wave actually build a quantum computer? Well, they apparently built a device with 16 very noisy superconducting quantum bits (or qubits), which they say they’ve used to help solve extremely small Sudoku puzzles. The trouble is, we’ve known for years that if qubits are sufficiently noisy — if they leak a sufficient amount of information into their environment — then they behave essentially like classical bits. Furthermore, D-Wave has refused to answer extremely basic technical questions about how high their noise rates are and so forth — they care about serving their customers, not answering nosy questions from academics. (Recently D-Wave founder Geordie Rose offered to answer my questions if I was interested in buying one of his machines. I replied that I was interested — my offer was$10 US — and I now await his answers as a prospective customer.)

To make a long story short, it’s consistent with the evidence that what D-Wave actually built would best be described as a 16-bit classical computer. I don’t mean 16 bits in terms of the architecture; I mean sixteen actual bits. And there’s some prior art for that.

But that’s actually not what annoyed me the most about the D-Wave announcement. What annoyed me were all the articles in the popular press — including places as reputable as The Economist — that said, what D-Wave has built is a machine that can try every possible solution in parallel and instantly pick the right one. This is what a quantum computer is; this is how it works.

It’s amazing to me how, as soon as the word “quantum” is mentioned, all the ordinary rules of journalism go out the window. No one thinks to ask: is that really what a quantum computer could do?

It turns out that, even though we don’t yet have scalable quantum computers, we do know something about what they could do if we did have them.

A quantum computer is a device that would exploit the laws of quantum mechanics to solve certain computational problems asymptotically faster than we know how to solve them with any computer today. Quantum mechanics — which has been our basic framework for physics for the last 80 years — is a theory that’s like probability theory, except that instead of real numbers called probabilities, you now have complex numbers called amplitudes. And the interesting thing about these complex numbers is that they can “interfere” with each other: they can cancel each other out.

In particular, to find the probability of something happening, you have to add the amplitudes for all the possible ways it could have happened, and then take the square of the absolute value of the result. And if some of the ways an event could happen have positive amplitude and others have negative amplitude, then the amplitudes can cancel out, so that the event doesn’t happen at all. This is exactly what’s going on in the famous double-slit experiment: at certain spots on a screen, the different paths a photon could’ve taken to get to that spot interfere destructively and cancel each other out, and as a result no photon is seen.

Now, the idea of quantum computing is to set up a massive double-slit experiment with exponentially many paths — and to try to arrange things so that the paths leading to wrong answers interfere destructively and cancel each other out, while the paths leading to right answers interfere constructively and are therefore observed with high probability.

You can see it’s a subtle effect that we’re aiming for. And indeed, it’s only for a few specific problems that people have figured out how to choreograph an interference pattern to solve the problem efficiently — that is, in polynomial time.

One of these problems happens to be that of factoring integers. Thirteen years ago, Peter Shor discovered that a quantum computer could efficient apply Fourier transforms over exponentially-large abelian groups, and thereby find the periods of exponentially-long periodic sequences, and thereby factor integers, and thereby break the RSA cryptosystem, and thereby snarf people’s credit card numbers. So that’s one application of quantum computers.

On the other hand — and this is the most common misconception about quantum computing I’ve encountered — we do not, repeat do not, know a quantum algorithm to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. For “generic” problems of finding a needle in a haystack, most of us believe that quantum computers will give at most a polynomial advantage over classical ones.

At this point I should step back. How many of you have heard of the following question: Does P=NP?

Yeah, this is a problem so profound that it’s appeared on at least two TV shows (The Simpsons and NUMB3RS). It’s also one of the seven (now six) problems for which the Clay Math Institute is offerring a million-dollar prize for a solution.

Apparently the mathematicians had to debate whether P vs. NP was “deep” enough to include in their list. Personally, I take it as obvious that it’s the deepest of them all. And the reason is this: if you had a fast algorithm for solving NP-complete problems, then not only could you solve P vs. NP, you could presumably also solve the other six problems. You’d simply program your computer to search through all possible proofs of at most (say) a billion symbols, in some formal system like Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. If such a proof existed, you’d find it in a reasonable amount of time. (And if the proof had more than a billion symbols, it’s not clear you’d even want to see it!)

This raises an important point: many people — even computer scientists — don’t appreciate just how profound the consequences would be if P=NP. They think it’s about scheduling airline flights better, or packing more boxes in your truck. Of course, it is about those things — but the point is that you can have a set of boxes such that if you could pack them into your truck, then you would also have proved the Riemann Hypothesis!

Of course, while the proof eludes us, we believe that P≠NP. We believe there’s no algorithm to solve NP-complete problems in deterministic polynomial time. But personally, I would actually make a stronger conjecture:

There is no physical means to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time — not with classical computers, not with quantum computers, not with anything else.

You could call this the “No SuperSearch Principle.” It says that, if you’re going to find a needle in a haystack, then you’ve got to expend at least some computational effort sifting through the hay.

I see this principle as analogous to the Second Law of Thermodynamics or the impossibility of superluminal signalling. That is, it’s a technological limitation which is also a pretty fundamental fact about the laws of physics. Like those other principles, it could always be falsified by experiment, but after a while it seems manifestly more useful to assume it’s true and then see what the consequences are for other things.

OK, so what do we actually know about the ability of quantum computers to solve NP-complete problems efficiently? Well, of course we can’t prove it’s impossible, since we can’t even prove it’s impossible for classical computers — that’s the P vs. NP problem! We might hope to at least prove that quantum computers can’t solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time unless classical computers can also — but even that, alas, seems far beyond our ability to prove.

What we can prove is this: suppose you throw away the structure of an NP-complete problem, and just consider it as an abstract, featureless space of 2n possible solutions, where the only thing you can do is guess a solution and check whether it’s right or not. In that case it’s obvious that a classical computer will need ~2n steps to find a solution. But what if you used a quantum computer, which could “guess” all possible solutions in superposition? Well, even then, you’d still need at least ~2n/2 steps to find a solution. This is called the BBBV Theorem, and was one of the first things learned about the power of quantum computers.

Intuitively, even though a quantum computer in some sense involves exponentially many paths or “parallel universes,” the single universe that happened on the answer can’t shout above all the other universes: “hey, over here!” It can only gradually make the others aware of its presence.

As it turns out, the 2n/2 bound is actually achievable. For in 1996, Lov Grover showed that a quantum computer can search a list of N items using only √N steps. It seems to me that this result should clearly feature in Google’s business plan.

Of course in real life, NP-complete problems do have structure, and algorithms like local search and backtrack search exploit that structure. Because of this, the BBBV theorem can’t rule out a fast quantum algorithm for NP-complete problems. It merely shows that, if such an algorithm existed, then it couldn’t work the way 99% of everyone who’s ever heard of quantum computing thinks it would!

You might wonder whether there’s any proposal for a quantum algorithm that would exploit the structure of NP-complete problems. As it turns out, there’s one such proposal: the “quantum adiabatic algorithm” of Farhi et al., which can be seen as the quantum version of simulated annealing. Intriguingly, Farhi and his collaborators proved that, on some problem instances where classical simulated annealing would take exponential time, the quantum adiabatic algorithm takes only polynomial time. Alas, we also know of problem instances where the adiabatic algorithm takes exponential time just as simulated annealing does. So while this is still an active research area, right now the adiabatic algorithm does not look like a magic bullet for solving NP-complete problems.

If quantum computers can’t solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, it raises an extremely interesting question: is there any physical means to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time?

Well, there have been lots of proposals. One of my favorites involves taking two glass plates with pegs between them, and dipping the resulting contraption into a tub of soapy water. The idea is that the soap bubbles that form between the pegs should trace out the minimum Steiner tree — that is, the minimum total length of line segments connecting the pegs, where the segments can meet at points other than the pegs themselves. Now, this is known to be an NP-hard optimization problem. So, it looks like Nature is solving NP-hard problems in polynomial time!

You might say there’s an obvious difficulty: the soap bubbles could get trapped in a local optimum that’s different from the global optimum. By analogy, a rock in a mountain crevice could reach a lower state of potential energy by rolling up first and then down … but is rarely observed to do so!

And if you said that, you’d be absolutely right. But that didn’t stop two guys a few years ago from writing a paper in which they claimed, not only that soap bubbles solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, but that that fact proves P=NP! In debates about this paper on newsgroups, several posters raised the duh-obvious point that soap bubbles can get trapped at local optima. But then another poster opined that that’s just an academic “party line,” and that he’d be willing to bet that no one had actually done an experiment to prove it.

Long story short, I went to the hardware store, bought some glass plates, liquid soap, etc., and found that, while Nature does often find a minimum Steiner tree with 4 or 5 pegs, it tends to get stuck at local optima with larger numbers of pegs. Indeed, often the soap bubbles settle down to a configuration which is not even a tree (i.e. contains “cycles of soap”), and thus provably can’t be optimal.

The situation is similar for protein folding. Again, people have said that Nature seems to be solving an NP-hard optimization problem in every cell of your body, by letting the proteins fold into their minimum-energy configurations. But there are two problems with this claim. The first problem is that proteins, just like soap bubbles, sometimes get stuck in suboptimal configurations — indeed, it’s believed that’s exactly what happens with Mad Cow Disease. The second problem is that, to the extent that proteins do usually fold into their optimal configurations, there’s an obvious reason why they would: natural selection! If there were a protein that could only be folded by proving the Riemann Hypothesis, the gene that coded for it would quickly get weeded out of the gene pool.

So: quantum computers, soap bubbles, proteins … if we want to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time in the physical world, what’s left? Well, we can try going to more exotic physics. For example, since we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, people have felt free to speculate that if we did have one, it would give us an efficient way to solve NP-complete problems. For example, maybe the theory would allow closed timelike curves, which would let us solve NP-complete and even harder problems by (in some sense) sending the answer back in time to before we started.

In my view, though, it’s more likely that a quantum theory of gravity will do the exact opposite: that is, it will limit our computational powers, relative to what they would’ve been in a universe without gravity. To see why, consider one of the oldest “extravagant” computing proposals: the Zeno computer. This is a computer that runs the first step of a program in one second, the second step in half a second, the third step in a quarter second, the fourth step in an eighth second, and so on, so that after two seconds it’s run infinitely many steps. (It reminds me of the old joke about the supercomputer that was so fast, it could do an infinite loop in 2.5 seconds.)

Question from the floor: In what sense is this even a “proposal”?

Answer: Well, it’s a proposal in the sense that people actually write papers about it! (Google “hypercomputation.”) Whether they should be writing those papers a separate question…

Now, the Zeno computer strikes most computer scientists — me included — as a joke. But why is it a joke? Can we say anything better than that it feels absurd to us?

As it turns out, this question takes us straight into some of the frontier issues in theoretical physics. In particular, one of the few things physicists think they know about quantum gravity — one of the few things both the string theorists and their critics largely agree on — is that, at the so-called “Planck scale” of about 10-33 centimeters or 10-43 seconds, our usual notions of space and time are going to break down. As one manifestation of this, if you tried to build a clock that ticked more than about 1043 times per second, that clock would use so much energy that it would collapse to a black hole. Ditto for a computer that performed more than about 1043 operations per second, or for a hard disk that stored more than about 1069 bits per square meter of surface area. (Together with the finiteness of the speed of light and the exponential expansion of the universe, this implies that, contrary to what you might have thought, there is a fundamental physical limit on how much disk space Gmail will ever be able to offer its subscribers…)

To summarize: while I believe what I called the “No SuperSearch Principle” — that is, while I believe there are fundamental physical limits to efficient computer search — I hope I’ve convinced you that understanding why these limits exist takes us straight into some of the deepest issues in math and physics. To me that’s so much the better — since it suggests that not only are the limits correct, but (more importantly) they’re also nontrivial.

Thank you.

Toads, lower bounds vie for control of Australia

Saturday, August 18th, 2007

What better way to procrastinate than to hear an Australian radio show interview me about the quantum query complexity of the collision problem, public-key cryptography, interactive proofs, computational intractability as a law of physics, and my great love for my high school? The first part of the program is about Australia’s population of cane toads (or rather, “tie-oads”). Then at 32:40, they start in with a report on the FQXi conference in Iceland, and interviews with Max Tegmark, Fred Adams, and Simon Saunders. I’m from 39:10 to 46:50.

• The interviewer, Pauline Newman, asks me about the practical implications of the collision lower bound, and then cuts to me talking about how quantum computers could break the RSA cryptosystem. Of course, the connection is only an indirect one (the collision lower bound is what gives hope that one could design collision-resistant hash functions that, unlike RSA, are secure even against quantum attacks).
• I said that, when trying to solve jigsaw puzzles or schedule airline flights, there doesn’t seem to be anything one can do that’s fundamentally better than trying every possibility. I should have added, “in the worst case.”
• The reason I mentioned how old I was when IP=PSPACE was proved is not that I’m a narcissist (though I am), but because in a section that was cut, Pauline asked me if I proved IP=PSPACE, and I was trying to make it clear that I didn’t. The theorem was proved by Shamir, building on work of Lund, Fortnow, Karloff, and Nisan.
• Pauline’s assertion that I “took off on a snowmobile without [my] passenger” and “left a distinguished physicist stranded on a glacier” is a gross exaggeration. What happened was, I waited and waited for someone — anyone — to climb onto my snowmobile. When no one did (maybe because everyone was scared by my abysmal driving ability), I figured I should just go.

Anyway, at least the um’s and uh’s seem to have been under control, compared to my interview with Lance two years ago.

Intellectual whack-a-mole

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

Several readers have now written to me independently, asking for my reaction to the following paper:

An Optical Solution For The Traveling Salesman Problem
Tobias Haist and Wolfgang Osten

Abstract: We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP–complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non–polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal–to–noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment.

Look, this is really not hard. You really don’t need a world CompuCrackpotism expert to tell you what to think of this. If you read carefully, the authors were actually kind enough to explain themselves, right in the abstract, why their proposal doesn’t scale. (This, of course, is entirely to their credit, and puts them above ~98% of their colleagues in the burgeoning intersection of computer science, physics, and non-correctness.)

Hint: If the number of photons scales exponentially with N, and the photons have high enough energies that you can detect them, then the energy also scales exponentially with N. So by the Schwarzschild bound, the volume also scales exponentially with N; therefore, by locality, so does the time.

Wanna bet?

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

A commenter on my previous post writes:

What all these scientists who are crying about the teaching of evolution should do is propose bets to creationists based on the outcomes of experiments … You think that these D-wave guys won’t be able to do something they’re claiming to be able to do? It might be a good exercise to make that statement precise … If someone has a conjecture of the form “There should exist a theory that explains X”, people roll their eyes, essentially because there’s no way of deciding the implicit bet.

Alright, imagine the following conversation:

Layperson: I just heard on the radio about this new Yood d’Shnood Theory of the Universe. What do you think the odds are that it’ll turn out to be true?

Scientist: Well, so far I haven’t seen any good evidence that…

Layperson: Sure, but what’s your prediction?

Scientist: As I said, the evidence seems to be explained a lot more easily by…

Layperson: But what if you had to bet?

Scientist: Well, there are two ways to think about this. What the Yood d’Shnood proponents argue is that…

Layperson: No, don’t give me a dissertation, just give me a number!

Here’s the thing: when my PhD diploma arrived in the mail, it didn’t imbue me with some sort of supernatural power to predict the outcomes of future quantum computing experiments, unmediated by the evidence and arguments of the temporal world. (This despite the fact that my diploma was signed by a time-travelling cyborg, in his official capacity as Governor of California and Regent of the UC system.)

Of course, the reason scientists worry about evidence is that ultimately, we want our theories to cohere with reality and our predictions to come out right. The experience of the last four centuries suggests this hope is far from futile. The trouble is that, once you’ve decided to adopt the evidence-centric strategy that’s worked so well in the past, you have to forget temporarily about betting odds. For the mindset of the scientist toying with rival explanations, and that of the Bayesian handicapping horses in a race, are (at least in my experience) simply too incompatible to inhabit the same brain at the same time.

If you’ll forgive the metaphor, asking for gambling odds on every scientific question is like asking a woman to sleep with you on the first date. Of course it’s in the back of your mind (and possibly not only yours), but it tends to be counterproductive even to bring it up. If you’re ever going to reach the summit, then you have to act like all that really matters to you is the climb, and the only reliable way to act like it is to remake yourself into the sort of person for whom it’s true. Such is the paradox of science and of life.

So, did D-Wave succeed in using the quantum adiabatic algorithm to solve Sudoku puzzles in fewer steps than those same puzzles would be solved with classical simulated annealing? I don’t know. To repeat, I don’t know. What I know is that I haven’t seen the evidence, and that the burden of providing such evidence rests with the people making the claim.

The Myth of the Ivory Tower

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

I know I promised no more posts about D-Wave and its “commercial” “quantum” computer for a while. But will you look at the bait that D-Wave founder Geordie Rose has been dangling in front of me on his blog?

People tend to approach problems and form opinions through the lens of their expertise. This happens all the time when disciplines are close … but it also happens in wierder [sic] situations, where the area of expertise is entirely disjoint from the situation being analyzed — like when theoretical computer scientists have opinions about real computers for example.

In Geordie’s comments section, the message is clearer still. One commenter writes that “the Professors didn’t get there first and they are angry; all truth must first come from them.” Another imagines “the Aaronsons of the world” fervently hoping that “their fragile self-created self-contained ecosystem can be re-built just the way they like it.”

For commenters like these, it would seem that the issue has nothing to do with decoherence rates or scalability, or with what the evidence is that D-Wave is actually harnessing quantum effects to obtain a computational speedup. So in this post, I want to step back and try to understand what the real issue is.

I propose that more than a few technology enthusiasts — not just the D-Wave supporters quoted above — are in the thrall of The Myth of the Ivory Tower. According to this Myth, the basic function of academic scientists is to sit around in their armchairs, pompously declaring to be impossible what plucky inventors like Thomas Edison or the Wright Brothers then roll up their sleeves and do. Now, I might be an academic myself, but I’m also a proud American (currently residing in the 51st state), and I won’t deny that this most American of myths has a certain resonance even for me. In the end, though, I believe that the Myth tells us more about our Zeitgeist, or our collective psyche, or something like that, than it does about the actual history of technology.

The “evidence” for the Myth (when such is offered) usually consists of famous last words from distinguished scientific authorities. You know the sort of thing I’m talking about:

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
X-rays will prove to be a hoax.
-William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
-Thomas Watson

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
-Ken Olsen

(Watson and Olsen were of course CEO’s, but for the purposes of the Myth they stand in here as “academics.”)

However, as soon as we think about these predictions and what they’re supposed to demonstrate, we notice some glaring problems. The first one is confirmation bias. No one compiles lists of pessimistic technological forecasts made by experts that turned out to be right — where would you even start?

The second problem is that many of the juiciest predictions come from a single individual: Lord Kelvin. Furthermore, they come from the twilight of his career, when he was considered to have lost his vortices even by most of his colleagues. Seeking to better understand this great physicist of the 19th century who was so wrong about the technologies of the 20th, I just read an excellent biography called Degrees Kelvin. One thing I learned is that, if the selective historians chose to focus on the first half of Kelvin’s career rather than the second, they could find equally exquisite anecdotes illustrating the reliability of academic opinions.

In the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in the 1850′s, there were two colorful personalities: Kelvin and Wildman Whitehouse. Whitehouse, the “practical” man, detested any math or physics he couldn’t understand, and insisted that a transatlantic cable would just be a longer version of existing cables. Kelvin, the “theorist,” said that while a transatlantic cable was certainly possible, it would need thicker insulation, a different kind of receiver, etc. than previous cables to work reliably, and that more testing and research was needed. As it happened, after laying a cable that was every bit as unreliable as Kelvin said it would be, Whitehouse (1) had to use Kelvin’s receiver to get any signal through at all, (2) faked the transcripts to make it look like he used his own receiver, (3) fatally damaged the cable by sending 2,000 volts through it in a desperate attempt to get it to work properly, and then (4) insisted the cable was still fine after it had permanently gone silent. Eventually the cable companies learned their lesson.

Despite this and other successes (e.g., the Second Law of Thermodynamics), Kelvin’s doofus predictions in later life do illustrate two important points. The first is that, if you’re going to make skeptical pronouncements, you’d better distinguish clearly between the provably impossible, the presumably impossible, and the merely difficult and not yet achieved. The second is that, if you’re going to claim something’s impossible, you’d better have an argument, and you’d better understand what assumptions it rests on.

Alright, so let’s move on to Watson and Olsen’s predictions about the computer industry. The funny thing is, these predictions weren’t nearly as stupid as they sound! Why? Because there’s nothing inevitable about the concept of a personal computer. Instead of billions of home PC’s, we could just as easily imagine most of the world’s computing power concentrated in a few servers, accessible remotely to anyone who wanted it. In this alternate universe, your desktop PC would be little more than a glorified information portal — a “browser,” if you will — while most of the actual application software (email, calendars, maps, etc.) ran elsewhere. I admit that this is just a fanciful, hypothetical scenario, but what does that matter to a theorist like me?

Speaking of which, the Internet was of course the child of DARPA and NSF, raised to adolescence in university CS departments. (DARPA has since reoriented itself toward projects with shorter-term payoff, its previous funding model having failed so disastrously.) The Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and the first popular web browser by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois. (And yes, Al Gore had a nontrivial role in funding this work.) R, S, and A were all at MIT. If you’re going to argue for the irrelevance of academic research, the Internet is not the place to start.

But what about some of the other spectacular inventions of the last fifty years: the laser, the transistor, the fiber-optic cable, the communications satellite? Didn’t those come from the private sector? As it happens, they came from Bell Labs, which is interesting as the sort of mammoth exception that proves the rule. Because of AT&T’s government-sanctioned monopoly, for much of the 20th century Bell Labs was able to function like the world’s largest university, devoting billions of dollars to “irrelevant” research. So in the 1980′s, when Congress decided to deregulate the phone system, many people predicted that Bell Labs would die a slow, agonizing death — a prediction that’s been borne out over the last 25 years.

But surely other companies must have picked up the slack? No, not really. While Microsoft, IBM, NEC, Xerox, and a few others all provide welcome support for basic research, none of them do so on the old Ma Bell’s scale. From a CEO’s perspective, the problem with basic research is obvious: a rising tide lifts all boats, your competitors’ as well as yours. (The famous cautionary example here is Xerox PARC, which made the “mistake” of giving the world the windowing system, the mouse, and the laser printer.)

For those who adhere to the religion of capitalism, have the Arrow-Debreu Theorem tattoed across their chests, etc., it might be difficult to understand how a system based on peer review rather than the free market could lead so consistently to technological breakthroughs. I mean, all those ivory-tower academics growing fat off government grants: what incentive could they possibly have to get the right answers? Without picky customers or venture capitalists breathing down their necks, what’s the penalty for being wrong?

I’m lucky enough to be friends with Robin Hanson, a brilliant economist and futurist who starts where Ayn Rand would’ve suffered a loss of nerve and keeps going from there. Robin has long argued that the scientific peer review process is broken, and ought to be supplanted by a futures market that would reward scientists for making correct predictions. As he writes:

The pace of scientific progress may be hindered by the tendency of our academic institutions to reward being popular, rather than being right … Academia is still largely a medieval guild, with a few powerful elites, many slave-like apprentices, and members who hold a monopoly on the research patronage of princes and the teaching of their sons …

Imagine that academics are expected to “put up or shut up” and accompany claims with at least token bets, and that statistics are collected on how well people do. Imagine that funding agencies subsidize pools on questions of interest to them, and that research labs pay for much of their research with winnings from previous pools. And imagine that anyone could play, either to take a stand on an important issue, or to insure against technological risk.

Personally, I hope that Robin’s science futures market gets tried on a significant scale, and I can’t wait to see the results. (Naturally, even the marketplace of ideas has to compete in the marketplace of ideas!) I agree with Robin that academic science is often tradition-bound to the point of absurdity, and that its institutions ought to be as open to scrutiny and replacement as its theories. But I don’t go as far as he apparently does in the direction of the Myth of the Ivory Tower. For me, the interesting thing about science is not that it’s broken, but rather that it’s about the least broken enterprise in the whole sorry history of our species.