## Archive for the ‘Quantum’ Category

### Quantum computing news items (by reader request)

Monday, January 12th, 2015

Within the last couple months, there was a major milestone in the quest to build a scalable quantum computer, and also a major milestone in the quest to figure out what you would do with a quantum computer if you had one.  As I’ve admitted many times, neither of those two quests is really the reason why I got into quantum computing—I’m one of the people who would still want to study this field, even if there were no serious prospect either of building a quantum computer or of doing anything useful with it for a thousand years—but for some reason that I don’t fully understand, both of those goals do seem to excite other people.

So, OK, the experimental breakthrough was the Martinis group’s use of quantum error-correction with superconducting qubits, to preserve a logical bit for several times longer than the underlying physical qubits survived for.  Shortly before this came out, I heard Krysta Svore give a talk at Yale in which she argued that preserving a logical qubit for longer than the physical qubits was the next experimental milestone (the fourth, out of seven she listed) along the way to a scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computer.  Well, it looks like that milestone may have been crossed.  (update: I’ve since learned from Graeme Smith, in the comments section, that the milestone crossed should really be considered the “3.5th,” since even though quantum error-correction was used, the information that was being protected was classical.  I also learned from commenter Jacob that the seven milestones Krysta listed came from a Science paper by Schoelkopf and Devorret.  She cited the paper; the forgetfulness was entirely mine.)

In more detail, the Martinis group used a linear array of 9 qubits: 5 data qubits interleaved with 4 measurement qubits. The authors describe this setup as a “precursor” to Kitaev’s surface code (which would involve a 2-dimensional array).  They report that, after 8 cycles of error detection and correction, they were able to suppress the effective error rate compared to the physical qubits by a factor of 8.5.  They also use quantum state tomography to verify that their qubits were indeed in entangled states as they did this.

Of course, this is not yet a demonstration of any nontrivial fault-tolerant computation, let alone of scaling such a computation up to where it’s hard to simulate with a classical computer.  But it pretty clearly lies along the “critical path” to that.

As I blogged back in September, Google recently hired Martinis’s group away from UC Santa Barbara, where they’ll work on superconducting quantum annealing, as a step along the way to full universal QC.  As I mentioned then, the Martinis group’s “Xmon” qubits have maybe 10,000 times the coherence times of D-Wave’s qubits, at least when you measure coherence in the usual ways.  The fact that Martinis et al. are carefully doing quantum state tomography and demonstrating beneficial error-correction before scaling up are further indications of the differences between their approach and D-Wave’s.  Of course, even if you do everything right, there’s still no guarantee that you’ll outperform a classical computer anytime soon: it might simply be that the things you can do in the near future (e.g., quantum annealing for NP-complete problems) are not things where you’re going to outperform the best classical algorithms.  But it’s certainly worth watching closely.

Meanwhile, the quantum algorithms breakthrough came in a paper last month by an extremely well-known trio down the Infinite Corridor from me: Farhi, Goldstone, and Gutmann.  In slightly earlier work, Farhi et al. proposed a new quantum algorithm for NP-hard optimization problems.  Their algorithm badly needs a name; right now they’re just calling it the “QAOA,” or Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm.  But here’s what you need to know: their new algorithm is different from their famous adiabatic algorithm, although it does become equivalent to the adiabatic algorithm in a certain infinite limit.  Rather than staying in the ground state of some Hamiltonian, the QAOA simply

1. starts with a uniform superposition over all n-bit strings,
2. applies a set of unitary transformations, one for each variable and constraint of the NP-hard instance,
3. repeats the set some number of times p (the case p=1 is already interesting), and then
4. measures the state in the computational basis to see what solution was obtained.

The unitary transformations have adjustable real parameters, and a big part of the game is figuring out how to set the parameters to get a good solution.

The original, hyper-ambitious goal of the QAOA was to solve the Unique Games problem in quantum polynomial time—thereby disproving the Unique Games Conjecture (which I previously blogged about here), unless NP⊆BQP.  It hasn’t yet succeeded at that goal.  In their earlier work, Farhi et al. managed to show that the QAOA solves the MAX-CUT problem on 3-regular graphs with approximation ratio 0.6924, which is better than random guessing, but not as good as the best-known classical algorithms (Goemans-Williamson, or for the degree-3 case, Halperin-Livnat-Zwick), let alone better than those algorithms (which is what would be needed to refute the UGC).

In their new work, Farhi et al. apply the QAOA to a different problem: the poetically-named MAX E3LIN2.  Here you’re given a collection of linear equations mod 2 in n Boolean variables, where each equation involves exactly 3 variables, and each variable appears in at most D equations.  The goal is to satisfy as many of the equations as possible, assuming that they’re not all satisfiable (if they were then the problem would be trivial).  If you just guess a solution randomly, you’ll satisfy a 1/2 fraction of the equations.  Håstad gave a polynomial-time classical algorithm that satisfies a 1/2+c/D fraction of the maximum number of satisfiable equations, for some constant c.  This remains the best approximation ratio that we know how to achieve classically.  Meanwhile, Trevisan showed that if there’s a polynomial-time classical algorithm that satisfies a 1/2+c/√D fraction of the max number of satisfiable equations, for a sufficiently large constant c, then P=NP.

OK, so what do Farhi et al. do?  They show that the QAOA, with suitably tuned parameters, is able to satisfy a 1/2+c/D3/4 fraction of the total number of equations in polynomial time, for some constant c.  (In particular, this implies that a 1/2+c/D3/4 fraction of the equations are satisfiable—assuming, as Farhi et al. do, that two equations directly contradicting each other, like x+y+z=0 and x+y+z=1, never appear in the same instance.)

Now, the above is a bigger fraction than the best-known classical algorithm satisfies!  (And not only that, but here the fraction is of the total number of equations, rather than the number of satisfiable equations.)  Farhi et al. also show that, if the constraint hypergraph doesn’t contain any small cycles, then QAOA can satisfy a 1/2+c/√D fraction of the equations in polynomial time, which is essentially the best possible unless NP⊆BQP.

The importance of this result is not that anyone cares about the MAX E3LIN2 problem for its own sake.  Rather it’s that, as far as I know, this is the first time that a quantum algorithm has been proved to achieve a better approximation ratio for a natural NP-hard optimization problem than the best known classical algorithm achieves.  People have discussed that as a hypothetical possibility for 20 years, but (again, unless I’m missing something) we never had a good example until now.  The big question now is whether the 1/2+c/D3/4 performance can be matched classically, or whether there truly is an NP-intermediate region of this optimization problem where quantum outperforms classical.  (The third possibility, that doing as well as the quantum algorithm is already NP-hard, is one that I won’t even speculate about.  For, as Boaz Barak rightly points out in the comments section, the quantum algorithm is still being analyzed only in the regime where solutions are combinatorially guaranteed to exist—and that regime can’t possibly be NP-hard, unless NP=coNP.)

[Above, I corrected some errors that appeared in the original version of this post—thanks to Ed Farhi and to the commenters for bringing them to my attention.]

### Quantum Complexity Theory Student Project Showcase 3

Friday, December 26th, 2014

Merry Christmas (belatedly)!  This year Quanta Claus has brought us eight fascinating final project reports from students in my 6.845 Quantum Complexity Theory class, covering everything from interactive proofs to query and communication complexity to quantum algorithms to quantum gates (and one project even includes a web-based demo you can try!).  Continuing in the tradition of the two previous showcases, I’m sharing the reports here; some of these works might also be posted to the arXiv and/or submitted to journals.  Thanks so much to the students who volunteered to participate in the showcase, and to all the students for making this such a great class.

### PostBQP Postscripts: A Confession of Mathematical Errors

Sunday, November 30th, 2014

tl;dr: This post reveals two errors in one of my most-cited papers, and also explains how to fix them.  Thanks to Piotr Achinger, Michael Cohen, Greg Kuperberg, Ciaran Lee, Ryan O’Donnell, Julian Rosen, Will Sawin, Cem Say, and others for their contributions to this post.

If you look at my Wikipedia page, apparently one of the two things in the world that I’m “known for” (along with algebrization) is “quantum Turing with postselection.”  By this, Wikipedia means my 2004 definition of the complexity class PostBQP—that is, the class of decision problems solvable in bounded-error quantum polynomial time, assuming the ability to postselect (or condition) on certain measurement outcomes—and my proof that PostBQP coincides with the classical complexity PP (that is, the class of decision problems expressible in terms of whether the number of inputs that cause a given polynomial-time Turing machine to accept does or doesn’t exceed some threshold).

To explain this a bit: even without quantum mechanics, it’s pretty obvious that, if you could “postselect” on exponentially-unlikely events, then you’d get huge, unrealistic amounts of computational power.  For example (and apologies in advance for the macabre imagery), you could “solve” NP-complete problems in polynomial time by simply guessing a random solution, then checking whether the solution is right, and shooting yourself if it happened to be wrong!  Conditioned on still being alive (and if you like, appealing to the “anthropic principle”), you must find yourself having guessed a valid solution—assuming, of course, that there were any valid solutions to be found.  If there weren’t any, then you’d seem to be out of luck!  (Exercise for the reader: generalize this “algorithm,” so that it still works even if you don’t know in advance whether your NP-complete problem instance has any valid solutions.)

So with the PostBQP=PP theorem, the surprise was not that postselection gives you lots of computational power, but rather that postselection combined with quantum mechanics gives you much more power even than postselection by itself (or quantum mechanics by itself, for that matter).  Since PPP=P#P, the class PP basically captures the full difficulty of #P-complete counting problems—that is, not just solving an NP-complete problem, but counting how many solutions it has.  It’s not obvious that a quantum computer with postselection can solve counting problems, but that’s what the theorem shows.  That, in turn, has implications for other things: for example, I showed it can be used to prove classical facts about PP, like the fact that PP is closed under intersection (the Beigel-Reingold-Spielman Theorem), in a straightforward way; and it’s also used to show the hardness of quantum sampling problems, in the work of Bremner-Jozsa-Shepherd as well as my BosonSampling work with Arkhipov.

I’m diffident about being “known for” something so simple; once I had asked the question, the proof of PostBQP=PP took me all of an hour to work out.  Yet PostBQP ended up being a hundred times more influential for quantum computing theory than things on which I expended a thousand times more effort.  So on balance, I guess I’m happy to call PostBQP my own.

That’s why today’s post comes with a special sense of intellectual responsibility.  Within the last month, it’s come to my attention that there are at least two embarrassing oversights in my PostBQP paper from a decade ago, one of them concerning the very definition of PostBQP.  I hasten to clarify: once one fixes up the definition, the PostBQP=PP theorem remains perfectly valid, and all the applications of PostBQP that I mentioned above—for example, to reproving Beigel-Reingold-Spielman, and to the hardness of quantum sampling problems—go through just fine.  But if you think I have nothing to be embarrassed about: well, read on.

The definitional subtlety came clearly to my attention a few weeks ago, when I was lecturing about PostBQP in my 6.845 Quantum Complexity Theory graduate class.  I defined PostBQP as the class of languages L⊆{0,1}* for which there exists a polynomial-time quantum Turing machine M such that, for all inputs x∈{0,1}*,

• M(x) “succeeds” (determined, say, by measuring its first output qubit in the {|0>,|1>} basis) with nonzero probability.
• If x∈L, then conditioned on M(x) succeeding, M(x) “accepts” (determined, say, by measuring its second output qubit in the {|0>,|1>} basis) with probability at least 2/3.
• If x∉L, then conditioned on M(x) succeeding, M(x) accepts with probability at most 1/3.

I then had to reassure the students that PostBQP, so defined, was a “robust” class: that is, that the definition doesn’t depend on stupid things like which set of quantum gates we allow. I argued that, even though we’re postselecting on exponentially-unlikely events, it’s still OK, because the Solovay-Kitaev Theorem lets us approximate any desired unitary to within exponentially-small error, with only a polynomial increase in the size of our quantum circuit. (Here we actually need the full power of the Solovay-Kitaev Theorem, in contrast to ordinary BQP, where we only need part of the power.)

A student in the class, Michael Cohen, immediately jumped in with a difficulty: what if M(x) succeeded, not with exponentially-small probability, but with doubly-exponentially-small probability—say, exp(-2n)?  In that case, one could no longer use the Solovay-Kitaev Theorem to show the irrelevance of the gate set.  It would no longer even be clear that PostBQP⊆PP, since the PP simulation might not be able to keep track of such tiny probabilities.

Thinking on my feet, I replied that we could presumably choose a set of gates—for example, gates involving rational numbers only—for which doubly-exponentially-small probabilities would never arise.  Or if all else failed, we could simply add to the definition of PostBQP that M(x) had to “succeed” with probability at least 1/exp(n): after all, that was the only situation I ever cared about anyway, and the only one that ever arose in the applications of PostBQP.

But the question still gnawed at me: was there a problem with my original, unamended definition of PostBQP?  If we weren’t careful in choosing our gate set, could we have cancellations that produced doubly-exponentially-small probabilities?  I promised I’d think about it more.

By a funny coincidence, just a couple weeks later, Ciaran Lee, a student at Oxford, emailed me the exact same question.  So on a train ride from Princeton to Boston, I decided to think about it for real.  It wasn’t hard to show that, if the gates involved square roots of rational numbers only—for example, if we’re dealing with the Hadamard and Toffoli gates, or the cos(π/8) and CNOT gates, or other standard gate sets—then every measurement outcome has at least 1/exp(n) probability, so there’s no problem with the definition of PostBQP.  But I didn’t know what might happen with stranger gate sets.

As is my wont these days—when parenting, teaching, and so forth leave me with almost no time to concentrate on math—I posted the problem to MathOverflow.  Almost immediately, I got incisive responses.  First, Piotr Achinger pointed out that, if we allow arbitrary gates, then it’s easy to get massive cancellations.  In more detail, let {an} be extremely-rapidly growing sequence of integers, say with an+1 > exp(an).  Then define

$$\alpha = \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} 0.1^{a_n}.$$

If we write out α in decimal notation, it will consist of mostly 0’s, but with 1’s spaced further and further apart, like so: 0.1101000000000001000….  Now consider a gate set that involves α as well as 0.1 and -0.1 as matrix entries.  Given n qubits, it’s not hard to see that we can set up an interference experiment in which one of the paths leading to a given outcome E has amplitude α, and the other paths have amplitudes $$-(0.1^{a_1}), -(0.1^{a_2}), \ldots, -(0.1^{a_k}),$$ where k is the largest integer such that ak≤n. In that case, the total amplitude of E will be about $$0.1^{a_{k+1}},$$ which for most values of n is doubly-exponentially small in n. Of course, by simply choosing a faster-growing sequence {an}, we can cause an even more severe cancellation.

Furthermore, by modifying the above construction to involve two crazy transcendental numbers α and β, I claim that we can set up a PostBQP computation such that deciding what happens is arbitrarily harder than PP (though still computable)—say, outside of exponential space, or even triple-exponential space. Moreover, we can do this despite the fact that the first n digits of α and β remain computable in O(n) time. The details are left as an exercise for the interested reader.

Yet even though we can engineer massive cancellations with crazy gates, I still conjectured that nothing would go wrong with “normal” gates: for example, gates involving algebraic amplitudes only. More formally, I conjectured that any finite set A=(a1,…,ak) of algebraic numbers is “tame,” in the sense that, if p is any degree-n polynomial with integer coefficients at most exp(n) in absolute value, then p(a1,…,ak)≠0 implies |p(a1,…,ak)|≥1/exp(n). And indeed, Julian Rosen on MathOverflow found an elegant proof of this fact. I’ll let you read it over there if you’re interested, but briefly, it interprets the amplitude we want as one particular Archimedean valuation of a certain element of a number field, and then lower-bounds the amplitude by considering the product of all Archimedean and non-Archimedean valuations (the latter of which involves the p-adic numbers). Since this was a bit heavy-duty for me, I was grateful when Will Sawin reformulated the proof in linear-algebraic terms that I understood.

And then came the embarrassing part. A few days ago, I was chatting with Greg Kuperberg, the renowned mathematician and author of our climate-change parable. I thought he’d be interested in this PostBQP progress, so I mentioned it to him. Delicately, Greg let me know that he had recently proved the exact same results, for the exact same reason (namely, fixing the definition of PostBQP), for the latest revision of his paper How Hard Is It to Approximate the Jones Polynomial?. Moreover, he actually wrote to me in June to tell me about this! At the time, however, I regarded it as “pointless mathematical hairsplitting” (who cares about these low-level gate-set issues anyway?). So I didn’t pay it any attention—and then I’d completely forgotten about Greg’s work when the question resurfaced a few months later. This is truly a just punishment for looking down on “mathematical hairsplitting,” and not a lesson I’ll soon forget.

Anyway, Greg’s paper provides yet a third proof that the algebraic numbers are tame, this one using Galois conjugates (though it turns out that, from a sufficiently refined perspective, Greg’s proof is equivalent to the other two).

There remains one obvious open problem here, one that I noted in the MathOverflow post and in which Greg is also extremely interested. Namely, we now know that it’s possible to screw up PostBQP using gates with amplitudes that are crazy transcendental numbers (closely related to the Liouville numbers). And we also know that, if the gates have algebraic amplitudes, then everything is fine: all events have at least 1/exp(n) probability. But what if the gates have not-so-crazy transcendental amplitudes, like 1/e, or (a bit more realistically) cos(2)?  I conjecture that everything is still fine, but the proof techniques that worked for the algebraic case seem useless here.

Stepping back, how great are the consequences of all this for our understanding of PostBQP? Fortunately, I claim that they’re not that great, for the following reason. As Adleman, DeMarrais, and Huang already noted in 1997—in the same paper that proved BQP⊆PP—we can screw up the definition even of BQP, let alone PostBQP, using a bizarre enough gate set. For example, suppose we had a gate G that mapped |0> to x|0>+y|1>, where y was a real number whose binary expansion encoded the halting problem (for example, y might equal Chaitin’s Ω).  Then by applying G more and more times, we could learn more and more bits of y, and thereby solve an uncomputable problem in the limit n→∞.

Faced with this observation, most quantum computing experts would say something like: “OK, but this is silly! It has no physical relevance, since we’ll never come across a magical gate like G—if only we did! And at any rate, it has nothing to do with quantum computing specifically: even classically, one could imagine a coin that landed heads with probability equal to Chaitin’s Ω. Therefore, the right way to deal with this is simply to define BQP in such a way as to disallow such absurd gates.” And indeed, that is what’s done today—usually without even remarking on it.

Now, it turns out that even gates that are “perfectly safe” for defining BQP, can turn “unsafe” when it comes to defining PostBQP. To screw up the definition of PostBQP, it’s not necessary that a gate involve uncomputable (or extremely hard-to-compute) amplitudes: the amplitudes could all be easily computable, but they could still be “unsafe” because of massive cancellations, as in the example above involving α. But one could think of this as a difference of degree, rather than of kind. It’s still true that there’s a large set of gates, including virtually all the gates anyone has ever cared about in practice (Toffoli, Hadamard, π/8, etc. etc.), that are perfectly safe for defining the complexity class; it’s just that the set is slightly smaller than it was for BQP.

The other issue with the PostBQP=PP paper was discovered by Ryan O’Donnell and Cem Say.  In Proposition 3 of the paper, I claim that PostBQP = BQPPostBQP||,classical, where the latter is the class of problems solvable by a BQP machine that’s allowed to make poly(n) parallel, classical queries to a PostBQP oracle.  As Ryan pointed out to me, nothing in my brief argument for this depended on quantum mechanics, so it would equally well show that PostBPP = BPPPostBPP||, where PostBPP (also known as BPPpath) is the classical analogue of PostBQP, and BPPPostBPP|| is the class of problems solvable by a BPP machine that can make poly(n) parallel queries to a PostBPP oracle.  But BPPPostBPP|| clearly contains BPPNP||, which in turn contains AM—so we would get AM in PostBPP, and therefore AM in PostBQP=PP.  But Vereshchagin gave an oracle relative to which AM is not contained in PP.  Since there was no nonrelativizing ingredient anywhere in my argument, the only possible conclusion is that my argument was wrong.  (This, incidentally, provides a nice illustration of the value of oracle results.)

In retrospect, it’s easy to pinpoint what went wrong.  If we try to simulate BPPPostBPP|| in PostBPP, our random bits will be playing a dual role: in choosing the queries to be submitted to the PostBPP oracle, and in providing the “raw material for postselection,” in computing the responses to those queries.  But in PostBPP, we only get to postselect once.  When we do, the two sets of random bits that we’d wanted to keep separate will get hopelessly mixed up, with the postselection acting on the “BPP” random bits, not just on the “PostBPP” ones.

How can we fix this problem?  Well, when defining the class BQPPostBQP||,classical, suppose we require the queries to the PostBQP oracle to be not only “classical,” but deterministic: that is, they have to be generated in advance by a P machine, and can’t depend on any random bits whatsoever.  And suppose we define BPPPostBPP||,classical similarly.  In that case, it’s not hard to see that the equalities BQPPostBQP||,classical = PostBQP and BPPPostBPP||,classical = PostBPP both go through.  You don’t actually care about this, do you?  But Ryan O’Donnell and Cem Say did, and that’s good enough for me.

I wish I could say that these are the only cases of mistakes recently being found in decade-old papers of mine, but alas, such is not the case.  In the near future, my student Adam Bouland, MIT undergrad Mitchell Lee, and Singapore’s Joe Fitzsimons will post to the arXiv a paper that grew out of an error in my 2005 paper Quantum Computing and Hidden Variables. In that paper, I introduced a hypothetical generalization of the quantum computing model, in which one gets to see the entire trajectory of a hidden variable, rather than just a single measurement outcome. I showed that this generalization would let us solve problems somewhat beyond what we think we can do with a “standard” quantum computer. In particular, we could solve the collision problem in O(1) queries, efficiently solve Graph Isomorphism (and all other problems in the Statistical Zero-Knowledge class), and search an N-element list in only ~N1/3 steps, rather than the ~N1/2 steps of Grover’s search algorithm. That part of the paper remains fine!

On the other hand, at the end of the paper, I also gave a brief argument to show that, even in the hidden-variable model, ~N1/3 steps are required to search an N-element list. But Mitchell Lee and Adam Bouland discovered that that argument is wrong: it fails to account for all the possible ways that an algorithm could exploit the correlations between the hidden variable’s values at different moments in time. (I’ve previously discussed this error in other blog posts, as well as in the latest edition of Quantum Computing Since Democritus.)

If we suitably restrict the hidden-variable theory, then we can correctly prove a lower bound of ~N1/4, or even (with strong enough assumptions) ~N1/3; and we do that in the forthcoming paper. Even with no restrictions, as far as we know an ~N1/3 lower bound for search with hidden variables remains true. But it now looks like proving it will require a major advance in our understanding of hidden-variable theories: for example, a proof that the “Schrödinger theory” is robust to small perturbations, which I’d given as the main open problem in my 2005 paper.

As if that weren’t enough, in my 2003 paper Quantum Certificate Complexity, I claimed (as a side remark) that one could get a recursive Boolean function f with an asymptotic gap between the block sensitivity bs(f) and the randomized certificate complexity RC(f). However, two and a half years ago, Avishay Tal discovered that this didn’t work, because block sensitivity doesn’t behave nicely under composition.  (In assuming it did, I was propagating an error introduced earlier by Wegener and Zádori.)  More broadly, Avishay showed that there is no recursively-defined Boolean function with an asymptotic gap between bs(f) and RC(f). On the other hand, if we just want some Boolean function with an asymptotic gap between bs(f) and RC(f), then Raghav Kulkarni observed that we can use a non-recursive function introduced by Xiaoming Sun, which yields bs(f)≈N3/7 and RC(f)≈N4/7. This is actually a larger separation than the one I’d wrongly claimed.

Now that I’ve come clean about all these things, hopefully the healing can begin at last.

### Lens of Computation on the Sciences

Tuesday, November 25th, 2014

This weekend, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton hosted a workshop on the “Lens of Computation in the Sciences,” which was organized by Avi Wigderson, and was meant to showcase theoretical computer science’s imperialistic ambitions to transform every other field.  I was proud to speak at the workshop, representing CS theory’s designs on physics.  But videos of all four of the talks are now available, and all are worth checking out:

Unfortunately, the videos were slow to buffer when I last tried it.  While you’re waiting, you could also check my PowerPoint slides, though they overlap considerably with my previous talks.  (As always, if you can’t read PowerPoint, then go ask another reader of this blog to convert the file into a format you like.)

Thanks so much to Avi, and everyone else at IAS, for organizing an awesome workshop!

### Der Quantencomputer

Friday, November 14th, 2014

### Speaking Truth to Parallelism at Cornell

Friday, October 3rd, 2014

This week I was at my alma mater, Cornell, to give a talk at the 50th anniversary celebration of its computer science department.  You can watch the streaming video here; my talk runs from roughly 1:17:30 to 1:56 (though if you’ve seen other complexity/physics/humor shows by me, this one is pretty similar, except for the riff about Cornell at the beginning).

Along with the 50th anniversary celebration, Bill Gates was also on campus to dedicate Bill and Melinda Gates Hall, the new home of Cornell’s CS department.  Click here for streaming video of a Q&A that Gates did with Cornell students, where I thought he acquitted himself quite well, saying many sensible things about education, the developing world, etc. that other smart people could also say, but that have extra gravitas coming from him.  Gates has also become extremely effective at wrapping barbs of fact inside a soft mesh of politically-unthreatening platitudes—but listen carefully and you’ll hear the barbs.  The amount of pomp and preparation around Gates’s visit reminded me of when President Obama visited MIT, befitting the two men’s approximately equal power.  (Obama has nuclear weapons, but then again, he also has Congress.)

And no, I didn’t get to meet Gates or shake his hand, though I did get to stand about ten feet from him at the Gates Hall dedication.  (He apparently spent most of his time at Cornell meeting with plant breeders, and other people doing things relevant to the Gates Foundation’s interests.)

Thanks so much to Bobby and Jon Kleinberg, and everyone else who invited me to this fantastic event and helped make it happen.  May Cornell’s CS department have a great next 50 years.

One last remark before I close this post.  Several readers have expressed disapproval and befuddlement over the proposed title of my next book, “Speaking Truth to Parallelism.”  In the words of commenter TonyK:

That has got to be the worst title in the history of publishing! “Speaking Truth to Parallelism”? It doesn’t even make sense! I count myself as one of your fans, Scott, but you’re going to have to do better than that if you want anybody else to buy your book. I know you can do better — witness “Quantum Computing Since Democritus”.

However, my experiences at Cornell this week helped to convince me that, not only does “Speaking Truth to Parallelism” make perfect sense, it’s an activity that’s needed now more than ever.  What it means, of course, is fighting a certain naïve, long-ago-debunked view of quantum computers—namely, that they would achieve exponential speedups by simply “trying every possible answer in parallel”—that’s become so entrenched in the minds of many journalists, laypeople, and even scientists from other fields that it feels like nothing you say can possibly dislodge it.  The words out of your mouth will literally be ignored, misheard, or even contorted to the opposite of what they mean, if that’s what it takes to preserve the listener’s misconception about quantum computers being able to solve NP-hard optimization problems by sheer magic.  (Much like in the Simpsons-visit-Australia episode, where Marge’s request for “coffee” is misheard over and over as “beer.”)  You probably think I’m exaggerating, and I’d agree with you—if I hadn’t experienced this phenomenon hundreds of times over the last decade.

So, to take one example: after my talk at Cornell, an audience member came up to me to say that it was a wonderful talk, but that what he really wanted to know was whether I thought quantum computers could solve problems in the “NP space” in linear time, by trying all the possible solutions at once.  He didn’t seem to realize that I’d spent the entire previous half hour answering that exact question, explaining why the answer was “no.”  Coincidentally, this week I also got an email from a longtime reader of this blog, saying that he read and loved Quantum Computing Since Democritus, and wanted my feedback on a popular article he’d written about quantum computing.  What was the gist of the article?  You guessed it: “quantum computing = generic exponential speedups for optimization, machine learning, and Big Data problems, by trying all the possible answers at once.”

These people’s enthusiasm for quantum computing tends to be so genuine, so sincere, that I find myself unable to blame them—even when they’ve done the equivalent of going up to Richard Dawkins and thanking him for having taught them that evolution works for the good of the entire species, just as its wise Designer intended.  I do blame the media and other careless or unscrupulous parties for misleading people about quantum computing, but most of all I blame myself, for not making my explanations clear enough.  In the end, then, meeting the “NP space” folks only makes me want to redouble my efforts to Speak Truth to Parallelism: eventually, I feel, the nerd world will get this point.

Update (Oct. 4): I had regarded this (perhaps wrongly) as too obvious to state, but particularly for non-native English speakers, I’d better clarify: “speaking truth to parallelism” is a deliberate pun on the left-wing protester phrase “speaking truth to power.”  So whatever linguistic oddness there is in my phrase, I’d say it simply inherits from the original.

Another Update (Oct. 7): See this comment for my short summary of what’s known about the actual technical question (can quantum computers solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, or not?).

Another Update (Oct. 8): Many commenters wrote to point out that the video of my talk at Cornell is now password-protected, and no longer publicly available.  I wrote to my contacts at Cornell to ask about this, and they said they’re planning to release lightly-edited versions of the videos soon, but will look into the matter in the meantime.

### Raise a martini glass for Google and Martinis!

Saturday, September 6th, 2014

We’ve already been discussing this in the comments section of my previous post, but a few people emailed me to ask when I’d devote a separate blog post to the news.

OK, so for those who haven’t yet heard: this week Google’s Quantum AI Lab announced that it’s teaming up with John Martinis, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, to accelerate the Martinis group‘s already-amazing efforts in superconducting quantum computing.  (See here for the MIT Tech‘s article, here for Wired‘s, and here for the WSJ‘s.)  Besides building some of the best (if not the best) superconducting qubits in the world, Martinis, along with Matthias Troyer, was also one of the coauthors of two important papers that found no evidence for any speedup in the D-Wave machines.  (However, in addition to working with the Martinis group, Google says it will also continue its partnership with D-Wave, in an apparent effort to keep reality more soap-operatically interesting than any hypothetical scenario one could make up on a blog.)

I have the great honor of knowing John Martinis, even once sharing the stage with him at a “Physics Cafe” in Aspen.  Like everyone else in our field, I profoundly admire the accomplishments of his group: they’ve achieved coherence times in the tens of microseconds, demonstrated some of the building blocks of quantum error-correction, and gotten tantalizingly close to the fault-tolerance threshold for the surface code.  (When, in D-Wave threads, people have challenged me: “OK Scott, so then which experimental quantum computing groups should be supported more?,” my answer has always been some variant of: “groups like John Martinis’s.”)

So I’m excited about this partnership, and I wish it the very best.

But I know people will ask: apart from the support and well-wishes, do I have any predictions?  Alright, here’s one.  I predict that, regardless of what happens, commenters here will somehow make it out that I was wrong.  So for example, if the Martinis group, supported by Google, ultimately succeeds in building a useful, scalable quantum computer—by emphasizing error-correction, long coherence times (measured in the conventional way), “gate-model” quantum algorithms, universality, and all the other things that D-Wave founder Geordie Rose has pooh-poohed from the beginning—commenters will claim that still most of the credit belongs to D-Wave, for whetting Google’s appetite, and for getting it involved in superconducting QC in the first place.  (The unstated implication being that, even if there were little or no evidence that D-Wave’s approach would ever lead to a genuine speedup, we skeptics still would’ve been wrong to state that truth in public.)  Conversely, if this venture doesn’t live up to the initial hopes, commenters will claim that that just proves Google’s mistake: rather than “selling out to appease the ivory-tower skeptics,” they should’ve doubled down on D-Wave.  Even if something completely different happens—let’s say, Google, UCSB, and D-Wave jointly abandon their quantum computing ambitions, and instead partner with ISIS to establish the world’s first “Qualiphate,” ruling with a niobium fist over California and parts of Oregon—I would’ve been wrong for having failed to foresee that.  (Even if I did sort of foresee it in the last sentence…)

Yet, while I’ll never live to see the blog-commentariat acknowledge the fundamental reasonableness of my views, I might live to see scalable quantum computers become a reality, and that would surely be some consolation.  For that reason, even if for no others, I once again wish the Martinis group and Google’s Quantum AI Lab the best in their new partnership.

Unrelated Announcement: Check out a lovely (very basic) introductory video on quantum computing and information, narrated by John Preskill and Spiros Michalakis, and illustrated by Jorge Cham of PhD Comics.

### “Could a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?”

Monday, August 25th, 2014

Author’s Note: Below is the prepared version of a talk that I gave two weeks ago at the workshop Quantum Foundations of a Classical Universe, which was held at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.  My talk is for entertainment purposes only; it should not be taken seriously by anyone.  If you reply in a way that makes clear you did take it seriously (“I’m shocked and outraged that someone who dares to call himself a scientist would … [blah blah]”), I will log your IP address, hunt you down at night, and force you to put forward an account of consciousness and decoherence that deals with all the paradoxes discussed below—and then reply at length to all criticisms of your account.

If you’d like to see titles, abstracts, and slides for all the talks from the workshop—including by Charles Bennett, Sean Carroll, James Hartle, Adrian Kent, Stefan Leichenauer, Ken Olum, Don Page, Jason Pollack, Jess Riedel, Mark Srednicki, Wojciech Zurek, and Michael Zwolak—click here.  You’re also welcome to discuss these other nice talks in the comments section, though I might or might not be able to answer questions about them.  Apparently videos of all the talks will be available before long (Jess Riedel has announced that videos are now available).

(Note that, as is probably true for other talks as well, the video of my talk differs substantially from the prepared version—it mostly just consists of interruptions and my responses to them!  On the other hand, I did try to work some of the more salient points from the discussion into the text below.)

Thanks so much to Charles Bennett and Jess Riedel for organizing the workshop, and to all the participants for great discussions.

I didn’t prepare slides for this talk—given the topic, what slides would I use exactly?  “Spoiler alert”: I don’t have any rigorous results about the possibility of sentient quantum computers, to state and prove on slides.  I thought of giving a technical talk on quantum computing theory, but then I realized that I don’t really have technical results that bear directly on the subject of the workshop, which is how the classical world we experience emerges from the quantum laws of physics.  So, given the choice between a technical talk that doesn’t really address the questions we’re supposed to be discussing, or a handwavy philosophical talk that at least tries to address them, I opted for the latter, so help me God.

Let me start with a story that John Preskill told me years ago.  In the far future, humans have solved not only the problem of building scalable quantum computers, but also the problem of human-level AI.  They’ve built a Turing-Test-passing quantum computer.  The first thing they do, to make sure this is actually a quantum computer, is ask it to use Shor’s algorithm to factor a 10,000-digit number.  So the quantum computer factors the number.  Then they ask it, “while you were factoring that number, what did it feel like?  did you feel yourself branching into lots of parallel copies, which then recohered?  or did you remain a single consciousness—a ‘unitary’ consciousness, as it were?  can you tell us from introspection which interpretation of quantum mechanics is the true one?”  The quantum computer ponders this for a while and then finally says, “you know, I might’ve known before, but now I just … can’t remember.”

I like to tell this story when people ask me whether the interpretation of quantum mechanics has any empirical consequences.

Look, I understand the impulse to say “let’s discuss the measure problem, or the measurement problem, or derivations of the Born rule, or Boltzmann brains, or observer-counting, or whatever, but let’s take consciousness off the table.”  (Compare: “let’s debate this state law in Nebraska that says that, before getting an abortion, a woman has to be shown pictures of cute babies.  But let’s take the question of whether or not fetuses have human consciousness—i.e., the actual thing that’s driving our disagreement about that and every other subsidiary question—off the table, since that one is too hard.”)  The problem, of course, is that even after you’ve taken the elephant off the table (to mix metaphors), it keeps climbing back onto the table, often in disguises.  So, for better or worse, my impulse tends to be the opposite: to confront the elephant directly.

Having said that, I still need to defend the claim that (a) the questions we’re discussing, centered around quantum mechanics, Many Worlds, and decoherence, and (b) the question of which physical systems should be considered “conscious,” have anything to do with each other.  Many people would say that the connection doesn’t go any deeper than: “quantum mechanics is mysterious, consciousness is also mysterious, ergo maybe they’re related somehow.”  But I’m not sure that’s entirely true.  One thing that crystallized my thinking about this was a remark made in a lecture by Peter Byrne, who wrote a biography of Hugh Everett.  Byrne was discussing the question, why did it take so many decades for Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation to become popular?  Of course, there are people who deny quantum mechanics itself, or who have basic misunderstandings about it, but let’s leave those people aside.  Why did people like Bohr and Heisenberg dismiss Everett?  More broadly: why wasn’t it just obvious to physicists from the beginning that “branching worlds” is a picture that the math militates toward, probably the simplest, easiest story one can tell around the Schrödinger equation?  Even if early quantum physicists rejected the Many-Worlds picture, why didn’t they at least discuss and debate it?

Here was Byrne’s answer: he said, before you can really be on board with Everett, you first need to be on board with Daniel Dennett (the philosopher).  He meant: you first need to accept that a “mind” is just some particular computational process.  At the bottom of everything is the physical state of the universe, evolving via the equations of physics, and if you want to know where consciousness is, you need to go into that state, and look for where computations are taking place that are sufficiently complicated, or globally-integrated, or self-referential, or … something, and that’s where the consciousness resides.  And crucially, if following the equations tells you that after a decoherence event, one computation splits up into two computations, in different branches of the wavefunction, that thereafter don’t interact—congratulations!  You’ve now got two consciousnesses.

And if everything above strikes you as so obvious as not to be worth stating … well, that’s a sign of how much things changed in the latter half of the 20th century.  Before then, many thinkers would’ve been more likely to say, with Descartes: no, my starting point is not the physical world.  I don’t even know a priori that there is a physical world.  My starting point is my own consciousness, which is the one thing besides math that I can be certain about.  And the point of a scientific theory is to explain features of my experience—ultimately, if you like, to predict the probability that I’m going to see X or Y if I do A or B.  (If I don’t have prescientific knowledge of myself, as a single, unified entity that persists in time, makes choices, and later observes their consequences, then I can’t even get started doing science.)  I’m happy to postulate a world external to myself, filled with unseen entities like electrons behaving in arbitrarily unfamiliar ways, if it will help me understand my experience—but postulating other versions of me is, at best, irrelevant metaphysics.  This is a viewpoint that could lead you Copenhagenism, or to its newer variants like quantum Bayesianism.

I’m guessing that many people in this room side with Dennett, and (not coincidentally, I’d say) also with Everett.  I certainly have sympathies in that direction too.  In fact, I spent seven or eight years of my life as a Dennett/Everett hardcore believer.  But, while I don’t want to talk anyone out of the Dennett/Everett view, I’d like to take you on a tour of what I see as some of the extremely interesting questions that that view leaves unanswered.  I’m not talking about “deep questions of meaning,” but about something much more straightforward: what exactly does a computational process have to do to qualify as “conscious”?

Of course, there are already tremendous difficulties here, even if we ignore quantum mechanics entirely.  Ken Olum was over much of this ground in his talk yesterday (see here for a relevant paper by Davenport and Olum).  You’ve all heard the ones about, would you agree to be painlessly euthanized, provided that a complete description of your brain would be sent to Mars as an email attachment, and a “perfect copy” of you would be reconstituted there?  Would you demand that the copy on Mars be up and running before the original was euthanized?  But what do we mean by “before”—in whose frame of reference?

Some people say: sure, none of this is a problem!  If I’d been brought up since childhood taking family vacations where we all emailed ourselves to Mars and had our original bodies euthanized, I wouldn’t think anything of it.  But the philosophers of mind are barely getting started.

To these standard thought experiments, we can add more.  Let’s suppose that, purely for error-correction purposes, the computer that’s simulating your brain runs the code three times, and takes the majority vote of the outcomes.  Would that bring three “copies” of your consciousness into being?  Does it make a difference if the three copies are widely separated in space or time—say, on different planets, or in different centuries?  Is it possible that the massive redundancy taking place in your brain right now is bringing multiple copies of you into being?

Maybe my favorite thought experiment along these lines was invented by my former student Andy Drucker.  In the past five years, there’s been a revolution in theoretical cryptography, around something called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which was first discovered by Craig Gentry.  What FHE lets you do is to perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data, without ever decrypting the data at any point.  So, to someone with the decryption key, you could be proving theorems, simulating planetary motions, etc.  But to someone without the key, it looks for all the world like you’re just shuffling random strings and producing other random strings as output.

You can probably see where this is going.  What if we homomorphically encrypted a simulation of your brain?  And what if we hid the only copy of the decryption key, let’s say in another galaxy?  Would this computation—which looks to anyone in our galaxy like a reshuffling of gobbledygook—be silently producing your consciousness?

When we consider the possibility of a conscious quantum computer, in some sense we inherit all the previous puzzles about conscious classical computers, but then also add a few new ones.  So, let’s say I run a quantum subroutine that simulates your brain, by applying some unitary transformation U.  But then, of course, I want to “uncompute” to get rid of garbage (and thereby enable interference between different branches), so I apply U-1.  Question: when I apply U-1, does your simulated brain experience the same thoughts and feelings a second time?  Is the second experience “the same as” the first, or does it differ somehow, by virtue of being reversed in time?  Or, since U-1U is just a convoluted implementation of the identity function, are there no experiences at all here?

Here’s a better one: many of you have heard of the Vaidman bomb.  This is a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics where there’s a package, and we’d like to “query” it to find out whether it contains a bomb—but if we query it and there is a bomb, it will explode, killing everyone in the room.  What’s the solution?  Well, suppose we could go into a superposition of querying the bomb and not querying it, with only ε amplitude on querying the bomb, and √(1-ε2) amplitude on not querying it.  And suppose we repeat this over and over—each time, moving ε amplitude onto the “query the bomb” state if there’s no bomb there, but moving ε2 probability onto the “query the bomb” state if there is a bomb (since the explosion decoheres the superposition).  Then after 1/ε repetitions, we’ll have order 1 probability of being in the “query the bomb” state if there’s no bomb.  By contrast, if there is a bomb, then the total probability we’ve ever entered that state is (1/ε)×ε2 = ε.  So, either way, we learn whether there’s a bomb, and the probability that we set the bomb off can be made arbitrarily small.  (Incidentally, this is extremely closely related to how Grover’s algorithm works.)

OK, now how about the Vaidman brain?  We’ve got a quantum subroutine simulating your brain, and we want to ask it a yes-or-no question.  We do so by querying that subroutine with ε amplitude 1/ε times, in such a way that if your answer is “yes,” then we’ve only ever activated the subroutine with total probability ε.  Yet you still manage to communicate your “yes” answer to the outside world.  So, should we say that you were conscious only in the ε fraction of the wavefunction where the simulation happened, or that the entire system was conscious?  (The answer could matter a lot for anthropic purposes.)

You might say, sure, maybe these questions are puzzling, but what’s the alternative?  Either we have to say that consciousness is a byproduct of any computation of the right complexity, or integration, or recursiveness (or something) happening anywhere in the wavefunction of the universe, or else we’re back to saying that beings like us are conscious, and all these other things aren’t, because God gave the souls to us, so na-na-na.  Or I suppose we could say, like the philosopher John Searle, that we’re conscious, and the lookup table and homomorphically-encrypted brain and Vaidman brain and all these other apparitions aren’t, because we alone have “biological causal powers.”  And what do those causal powers consist of?  Hey, you’re not supposed to ask that!  Just accept that we have them.  Or we could say, like Roger Penrose, that we’re conscious and the other things aren’t because we alone have microtubules that are sensitive to uncomputable effects from quantum gravity.  But neither of those two options ever struck me as much of an improvement.

Yet I submit to you that, between these extremes, there’s another position we can stake out—one that I certainly don’t know to be correct, but that would solve so many different puzzles if it were correct that, for that reason alone, it seems to me to merit more attention than it usually receives.  (In an effort to give the view that attention, a couple years ago I wrote an 85-page essay called The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, which one or two people told me they actually read all the way through.)  If, after a lifetime of worrying (on weekends) about stuff like whether a giant lookup table would be conscious, I now seem to be arguing for this particular view, it’s less out of conviction in its truth than out of a sense of intellectual obligation: to whatever extent people care about these slippery questions at all, to whatever extent they think various alternative views deserve a hearing, I believe this one does as well.

The intermediate position that I’d like to explore says the following.  Yes, consciousness is a property of any suitably-organized chunk of matter.  But, in addition to performing complex computations, or passing the Turing Test, or other information-theoretic conditions that I don’t know (and don’t claim to know), there’s at least one crucial further thing that a chunk of matter has to do before we should consider it conscious.  Namely, it has to participate fully in the Arrow of Time.  More specifically, it has to produce irreversible decoherence as an intrinsic part of its operation.  It has to be continually taking microscopic fluctuations, and irreversibly amplifying them into stable, copyable, macroscopic classical records.

Before I go further, let me be extremely clear about what this view is not saying.  Firstly, it’s not saying that the brain is a quantum computer, in any interesting sense—let alone a quantum-gravitational computer, like Roger Penrose wants!  Indeed, I see no evidence, from neuroscience or any other field, that the cognitive information processing done by the brain is anything but classical.  The view I’m discussing doesn’t challenge conventional neuroscience on that account.

Secondly, this view doesn’t say that consciousness is in any sense necessary for decoherence, or for the emergence of a classical world.  I’ve never understood how one could hold such a belief, while still being a scientific realist.  After all, there are trillions of decoherence events happening every second in stars and asteroids and uninhabited planets.  Do those events not “count as real” until a human registers them?  (Or at least a frog, or an AI?)  The view I’m discussing only asserts the converse: that decoherence is necessary for consciousness.  (By analogy, presumably everyone agrees that some amount of computation is necessary for an interesting consciousness, but that doesn’t mean consciousness is necessary for computation.)

Thirdly, the view I’m discussing doesn’t say that “quantum magic” is the explanation for consciousness.  It’s silent on the explanation for consciousness (to whatever extent that question makes sense); it seeks only to draw a defensible line between the systems we want to regard as conscious and the systems we don’t—to address what I recently called the Pretty-Hard Problem.  And the (partial) answer it suggests doesn’t seem any more “magical” to me than any other proposed answer to the same question.  For example, if one said that consciousness arises from any computation that’s sufficiently “integrated” (or something), I could reply: what’s the “magical force” that imbues those particular computations with consciousness, and not other computations I can specify?  Or if one said (like Searle) that consciousness arises from the biology of the brain, I could reply: so what’s the “magic” of carbon-based biology, that could never be replicated in silicon?  Or even if one threw up one’s hands and said everything was conscious, I could reply: what’s the magical power that imbues my stapler with a mind?  Each of these views, along with the view that stresses the importance of decoherence and the arrow of time, is worth considering.  In my opinion, each should be judged according to how well it holds up under the most grueling battery of paradigm-cases, thought experiments, and reductios ad absurdum we can devise.

So, why might one conjecture that decoherence, and participation in the arrow of time, were necessary conditions for consciousness?  I suppose I could offer some argument about our subjective experience of the passage of time being a crucial component of our consciousness, and the passage of time being bound up with the Second Law.  Truthfully, though, I don’t have any a-priori argument that I find convincing.  All I can do is show you how many apparent paradoxes get resolved if you make this one speculative leap.

For starters, if you think about exactly how our chunk of matter is going to amplify microscopic fluctuations, it could depend on details like the precise spin orientations of various subatomic particles in the chunk.  But that has an interesting consequence: if you’re an outside observer who doesn’t know the chunk’s quantum state, it might be difficult or impossible for you to predict what the chunk is going to do next—even just to give decent statistical predictions, like you can for a hydrogen atom.  And of course, you can’t in general perform a measurement that will tell you the chunk’s quantum state, without violating the No-Cloning Theorem.  For the same reason, there’s in general no physical procedure that you can apply to the chunk to duplicate it exactly: that is, to produce a second chunk that you can be confident will behave identically (or almost identically) to the first, even just in a statistical sense.  (Again, this isn’t assuming any long-range quantum coherence in the chunk: only microscopic coherence that then gets amplified.)

It might be objected that there are all sorts of physical systems that “amplify microscopic fluctuations,” but that aren’t anything like what I described, at least not in any interesting sense: for example, a Geiger counter, or a photodetector, or any sort of quantum-mechanical random-number generator.  You can make, if not an exact copy of a Geiger counter, surely one that’s close enough for practical purposes.  And, even though the two counters will record different sequences of clicks when pointed at identical sources, the statistical distribution of clicks will be the same (and precisely calculable), and surely that’s all that matters.  So, what separates these examples from the sorts of examples I want to discuss?

What separates them is the undisputed existence of what I’ll call a clean digital abstraction layer.  By that, I mean a macroscopic approximation to a physical system that an external observer can produce, in principle, without destroying the system; that can be used to predict what the system will do to excellent accuracy (given knowledge of the environment); and that “sees” quantum-mechanical uncertainty—to whatever extent it does—as just a well-characterized source of random noise.  If a system has such an abstraction layer, then we can regard any quantum noise as simply part of the “environment” that the system observes, rather than part of the system itself.  I’ll take it as clear that such clean abstraction layers exist for a Geiger counter, a photodetector, or a computer with a quantum random number generator.  By contrast, for (say) an animal brain, I regard it as currently an open question whether such an abstraction layer exists or not.  If, someday, it becomes routine for nanobots to swarm through people’s brains and make exact copies of them—after which the “original” brains can be superbly predicted in all circumstances, except for some niggling differences that are traceable back to different quantum-mechanical dice rolls—at that point, perhaps educated opinion will have shifted to the point where we all agree the brain does have a clean digital abstraction layer.  But from where we stand today, it seems entirely possible to agree that the brain is a physical system obeying the laws of physics, while doubting that the nanobots would work as advertised.  It seems possible that—as speculated by Bohr, Compton, Eddington, and even Alan Turing—if you want to get it right you’ll need more than just the neural wiring graph, the synaptic strengths, and the approximate neurotransmitter levels.  Maybe you also need (e.g.) the internal states of the neurons, the configurations of sodium-ion channels, or other data that you simply can’t get without irreparably damaging the original brain—not only as a contingent matter of technology but as a fundamental matter of physics.

(As a side note, I should stress that obviously, even without invasive nanobots, our brains are constantly changing, but we normally don’t say as a result that we become completely different people at each instant!  To my way of thinking, though, this transtemporal identity is fundamentally different from a hypothetical identity between different “copies” of you, in the sense we’re talking about.  For one thing, all your transtemporal doppelgängers are connected by a single, linear chain of causation.  For another, outside movies like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, you can’t meet your transtemporal doppelgängers and have a conversation with them, nor can scientists do experiments on some of them, then apply what they learned to others that remained unaffected by their experiments.)

So, on this view, a conscious chunk of matter would be one that not only acts irreversibly, but that might well be unclonable for fundamental physical reasons.  If so, that would neatly resolve many of the puzzles that I discussed before.  So for example, there’s now a straightforward reason why you shouldn’t consent to being killed, while your copy gets recreated on Mars from an email attachment.  Namely, that copy will have a microstate with no direct causal link to your “original” microstate—so while it might behave similarly to you in many ways, you shouldn’t expect that your consciousness will “transfer” to it.  If you wanted to get your exact microstate to Mars, you could do that in principle using quantum teleportation—but as we all know, quantum teleportation inherently destroys the original copy, so there’s no longer any philosophical problem!  (Or, of course, you could just get on a spaceship bound for Mars: from a philosophical standpoint, it amounts to the same thing.)

Similarly, in the case where the simulation of your brain was run three times for error-correcting purposes: that could bring about three consciousnesses if, and only if, the three simulations were tied to different sets of decoherence events.  The giant lookup table and the Earth-sized brain simulation wouldn’t bring about any consciousness, unless they were implemented in such a way that they no longer had a clean digital abstraction layer.  What about the homomorphically-encrypted brain simulation?  That might no longer work, simply because we can’t assume that the microscopic fluctuations that get amplified are homomorphically encrypted.  Those are “in the clear,” which inevitably leaks information.  As for the quantum computer that simulates your thought processes and then perfectly reverses the simulation, or that queries you like a Vaidman bomb—in order to implement such things, we’d of course need to use quantum fault-tolerance, so that the simulation of you stayed in an encoded subspace and didn’t decohere.  But under our assumption, that would mean the simulation wasn’t conscious.

Now, it might seem to some of you like I’m suggesting something deeply immoral.  After all, the view I’m considering implies that, even if a system passed the Turing Test, and behaved identically to a human, even if it eloquently pleaded for its life, if it wasn’t irreversibly decohering microscopic events then it wouldn’t be conscious, so it would be fine to kill it, torture it, whatever you want.

But wait a minute: if a system isn’t doing anything irreversible, then what exactly does it mean to “kill” it?  If it’s a classical computation, then at least in principle, you could always just restore from backup.  You could even rewind and not only erase the memories of, but “uncompute” (“untorture”?) whatever tortures you had performed.  If it’s a quantum computation, you could always invert the unitary transformation U that corresponded to killing the thing (then reapply U and invert it again for good measure, if you wanted).  Only for irreversible systems are there moral acts with irreversible consequences.

This is related to something that’s bothered me for years in quantum foundations.  When people discuss Schrödinger’s cat, they always—always—insert some joke about, “obviously, this experiment wouldn’t pass the Ethical Review Board.  Nowadays, we try to avoid animal cruelty in our quantum gedankenexperiments.”  But actually, I claim that there’s no animal cruelty at all in the Schrödinger’s cat experiment.  And here’s why: in order to prove that the cat was ever in a coherent superposition of |Alive〉 and |Dead〉, you need to be able to measure it in a basis like {|Alive〉+|Dead〉,|Alive〉-|Dead〉}.  But if you can do that, you must have such precise control over all the cat’s degrees of freedom that you can also rotate unitarily between the |Alive〉 and |Dead〉 states.  (To see this, let U be the unitary that you applied to the |Alive〉 branch, and V the unitary that you applied to the |Dead〉 branch, to bring them into coherence with each other; then consider applying U-1V.)  But if you can do that, then in what sense should we say that the cat in the |Dead〉 state was ever “dead” at all?  Normally, when we speak of “killing,” we mean doing something irreversible—not rotating to some point in a Hilbert space that we could just as easily rotate away from.

(There followed discussion among some audience members about the question of whether, if you destroyed all records of some terrible atrocity, like the Holocaust, everywhere in the physical world, you would thereby cause the atrocity “never to have happened.”  Many people seemed surprised by my willingness to accept that implication of what I was saying.  By way of explaining, I tried to stress just how far our everyday, intuitive notion of “destroying all records of something” falls short of what would actually be involved here: when we think of “destroying records,” we think about burning books, destroying the artifacts in museums, silencing witnesses, etc.  But even if all those things were done and many others, still the exact configurations of the air, the soil, and photons heading away from the earth at the speed of light would retain their silent testimony to the Holocaust’s reality.  “Erasing all records” in the physics sense would be something almost unimaginably more extreme: it would mean inverting the entire physical evolution in the vicinity of the earth, stopping time’s arrow and running history itself backwards.  Such ‘unhappening’ of what’s happened is something that we lack any experience of, at least outside of certain quantum interference experiments—though in the case of the Holocaust, one could be forgiven for wishing it were possible.)

OK, so much for philosophy of mind and morality; what about the interpretation of quantum mechanics?  If we think about consciousness in the way I’ve suggested, then who’s right: the Copenhagenists or the Many-Worlders?  You could make a case for either.  The Many-Worlders would be right that we could always, if we chose, think of decoherence events as “splitting” our universe into multiple branches, each with different versions of ourselves, that thereafter don’t interact.  On the other hand, the Copenhagenists would be right that, even in principle, we could never do any experiment where this “splitting” of our minds would have any empirical consequence.  On this view, if you can control a system well enough that you can actually observe interference between the different branches, then it follows that you shouldn’t regard the system as conscious, because it’s not doing anything irreversible.

In my essay, the implication that concerned me the most was the one for “free will.”  If being conscious entails amplifying microscopic events in an irreversible and unclonable way, then someone looking at a conscious system from the outside might not, in general, be able to predict what it’s going to do next, not even probabilistically.  In other words, its decisions might be subject to at least some “Knightian uncertainty”: uncertainty that we can’t even quantify in a mutually-agreed way using probabilities, in the same sense that we can quantify our uncertainty about (say) the time of a radioactive decay.  And personally, this is actually the sort of “freedom” that interests me the most.  I don’t really care if my choices are predictable by God, or by a hypothetical Laplace demon: that is, if they would be predictable (at least probabilistically), given complete knowledge of the microstate of the universe.  By definition, there’s essentially no way for my choices not to be predictable in that weak and unempirical sense!  On the other hand, I’d prefer that my choices not be completely predictable by other people.  If someone could put some sheets of paper into a sealed envelope, then I spoke extemporaneously for an hour, and then the person opened the envelope to reveal an exact transcript of everything I said, that’s the sort of thing that really would cause me to doubt in what sense “I” existed as a locus of thought.  But you’d have to actually do the experiment (or convince me that it could be done): it doesn’t count just to talk about it, or to extrapolate from fMRI experiments that predict which of two buttons a subject is going to press with 60% accuracy a few seconds in advance.

But since we’ve got some cosmologists in the house, let me now turn to discussing the implications of this view for Boltzmann brains.

(For those tuning in from home: a Boltzmann brain is a hypothetical chance fluctuation in the late universe, which would include a conscious observer with all the perceptions that a human being—say, you—is having right now, right down to false memories and false beliefs of having arisen via Darwinian evolution.  On statistical grounds, the overwhelming majority of Boltzmann brains last just long enough to have a single thought—like, say, the one you’re having right now—before they encounter the vacuum and freeze to death.  If you measured some part of the vacuum state toward which our universe seems to be heading, asking “is there a Boltzmann brain here?,” quantum mechanics predicts that the probability would be ridiculously astronomically small, but nonzero.  But, so the argument goes, if the vacuum lasts for infinite time, then as long as the probability is nonzero, it doesn’t matter how tiny it is: you’ll still get infinitely many Boltzmann brains indistinguishable from any given observer; and for that reason, any observer should consider herself infinitely likelier to be a Boltzmann brain than to be the “real,” original version.  For the record, even among the strange people at the IBM workshop, no one actually worried about being a Boltzmann brain.  The question, rather, is whether, if a cosmological model predicts Boltzmann brains, then that’s reason enough to reject the model, or whether we can live with such a prediction, since we have independent grounds for knowing that we can’t be Boltzmann brains.)

At this point, you can probably guess where this is going.  If decoherence, entropy production, full participation in the arrow of time are necessary conditions for consciousness, then it would follow, in particular, that a Boltzmann brain is not conscious.  So we certainly wouldn’t be Boltzmann brains, even under a cosmological model that predicts infinitely more of them than of us.  We can wipe our hands; the problem is solved!

I find it extremely interesting that, in their recent work, Kim Boddy, Sean Carroll, and Jason Pollack reached a similar conclusion, but from a completely different starting point.  They said: look, under reasonable assumptions, the late universe is just going to stay forever in an energy eigenstate—just sitting there doing nothing.  It’s true that, if someone came along and measured the energy eigenstate, asking “is there a Boltzmann brain here?,” then with a tiny but nonzero probability the answer would be yes.  But since no one is there measuring, what licenses us to interpret the nonzero overlap in amplitude with the Boltzmann brain state, as a nonzero probability of there being a Boltzmann brain?  I think they, too, are implicitly suggesting: if there’s no decoherence, no arrow of time, then we’re not authorized to say that anything is happening that “counts” for anthropic purposes.

Let me now mention an obvious objection.  (In fact, when I gave the talk, this objection was raised much earlier.)  You might say, “look, if you really think irreversible decoherence is a necessary condition for consciousness, then you might find yourself forced to say that there’s no consciousness, because there might not be any such thing as irreversible decoherence!  Imagine that our entire solar system were enclosed in an anti de Sitter (AdS) boundary, like in Greg Egan’s science-fiction novel Quarantine.  Inside the box, there would just be unitary evolution in some Hilbert space: maybe even a finite-dimensional Hilbert space.  In which case, all these ‘irreversible amplifications’ that you lay so much stress on wouldn’t be irreversible at all: eventually all the Everett branches would recohere; in fact they’d decohere and recohere infinitely many times.  So by your lights, how could anything be conscious inside the box?”

My response to this involves one last speculation.  I speculate that the fact that we don’t appear to live in AdS space—that we appear to live in (something evolving toward) a de Sitter space, with a positive cosmological constant—might be deep and important and relevant.  I speculate that, in our universe, “irreversible decoherence” means: the records of what you did are now heading toward our de Sitter horizon at the speed of light, and for that reason alone—even if for no others—you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  (Here I should point out, as several workshop attendees did to me, that Bousso and Susskind explored something similar in their paper The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.)

Does this mean that, if cosmologists discover tomorrow that the cosmological constant is negative, or will become negative, then it will turn out that none of us were ever conscious?  No, that’s stupid.  What it would suggest is that the attempt I’m now making on the Pretty-Hard Problem had smacked into a wall (an AdS wall?), so that I, and anyone else who stressed in-principle irreversibility, should go back to the drawing board.  (By analogy, if some prescription for getting rid of Boltzmann brains fails, that doesn’t mean we are Boltzmann brains; it just means we need a new prescription.  Tempting as it is to skewer our opponents’ positions with these sorts of strawman inferences, I hope we can give each other the courtesy of presuming a bare minimum of sense.)

Another question: am I saying that, in order to be absolutely certain of whether some entity satisfied the postulated precondition for consciousness, one might, in general, need to look billions of years into the future, to see whether the “decoherence” produced by the entity was really irreversible?  Yes (pause to gulp bullet).  I am saying that.  On the other hand, I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as it sounds.  After all, the category of “consciousness” might be morally relevant, or relevant for anthropic reasoning, but presumably we all agree that it’s unlikely to play any causal role in the fundamental laws of physics.  So it’s not as if we’ve introduced any teleology into the laws of physics by this move.

Let me end by pointing out what I’ll call the “Tegmarkian slippery slope.”  It feels scientific and rational—from the perspective of many of us, even banal—to say that, if we’re conscious, then any sufficiently-accurate computer simulation of us would also be.  But I tried to convince you that this view depends, for its aura of obviousness, on our agreeing not to probe too closely exactly what would count as a “sufficiently-accurate” simulation.  E.g., does it count if the simulation is done in heavily-encrypted form, or encoded as a giant lookup table?  Does it matter if anyone actually runs the simulation, or consults the lookup table?  Now, all the way at the bottom of the slope is Max Tegmark, who asks: to produce consciousness, what does it matter if the simulation is physically instantiated at all?  Why isn’t it enough for the simulation to “exist” mathematically?  Or, better yet: if you’re worried about your infinitely-many Boltzmann brain copies, then why not worry equally about the infinitely many descriptions of your life history that are presumably encoded in the decimal expansion of π?  Why not hold workshops about how to avoid the prediction that we’re infinitely likelier to be “living in π” than to be our “real” selves?

From this extreme, even most scientific rationalists recoil.  They say, no, even if we don’t yet know exactly what’s meant by “physical instantiation,” we agree that you only get consciousness if the computer program is physically instantiated somehow.  But now I have the opening I want.  I can say: once we agree that physical existence is a prerequisite for consciousness, why not participation in the Arrow of Time?  After all, our ordinary ways of talking about sentient beings—outside of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and maybe theology—don’t even distinguish between the concepts “exists” and “exists and participates in the Arrow of Time.”  And to say we have no experience of reversible, clonable, coherently-executable, atemporal consciousnesses is a massive understatement.

Of course, we should avoid the sort of arbitrary prejudice that Turing warned against in Computing Machinery and Intelligence.  Just because we lack experience with extraterrestrial consciousnesses, doesn’t mean it would be OK to murder an intelligent extraterrestrial if we met one tomorrow.  In just the same way, just because we lack experience with clonable, atemporal consciousnesses, doesn’t mean it would be OK to … wait!  As we said before, clonability, and aloofness from time’s arrow, call severely into question what it even means to “murder” something.  So maybe this case isn’t as straightforward as the extraterrestrials after all.

At this point, I’ve probably laid out enough craziness, so let me stop and open things up for discussion.

### “How Might Quantum Information Transform Our Future?”

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014

So, the Templeton Foundation invited me to write a 1500-word essay on the above question.  It’s like a blog post, except they pay me to do it!  My essay is now live, here.  I hope you enjoy my attempt at techno-futurist prose.  You can comment on the essay either here or over at Templeton’s site.  Thanks very much to Ansley Roan for commissioning the piece.

### Randomness Rules in Quantum Mechanics

Monday, June 16th, 2014

So, Part II of my two-part series for American Scientist magazine about how to recognize random numbers is now out.  This part—whose original title was the one above, but was changed to “Quantum Randomness” to fit the allotted space—is all about quantum mechanics and the Bell inequality, and their use in generating “Einstein-certified random numbers.”  I discuss the CHSH game, the Free Will Theorem, and Gerard ‘t Hooft’s “superdeterminism” (just a bit), before explaining the striking recent protocols of Colbeck, Pironio et al., Vazirani and Vidick, Couldron and Yuen, and Miller and Shi, all of which expand a short random seed into additional random bits that are “guaranteed to be random unless Nature resorted to faster-than-light communication to bias them.”  I hope you like it.

[Update: See here for Hacker News thread]

In totally unrelated news, President Obama’s commencement speech at UC Irvine, about climate change and the people who still deny its reality, is worth reading.