## Archive for the ‘Complexity’ Category

### Is the P vs. NP problem ill-posed? (Answer: no.)

Wednesday, August 13th, 2014

A couple days ago, a reader wrote to me to ask whether it’s possible that the solution to the P vs. NP problem is simply undefined—and that one should enlarge the space of possible answers using non-classical logics (the reader mentioned something called Catuṣkoṭi logic).  Since other people have emailed me with similar questions in the past, I thought my response might be of more general interest, and decided to post it here.

Thanks for your mail!  I’m afraid I don’t agree with you that there’s a problem in the formulation of P vs. NP.  Let me come at it this way:

Do you also think there might be a problem in the formulation of Goldbach’s Conjecture?  Or the Twin Prime Conjecture?  (I.e., that maybe the definition of “prime number” needs to be modified using Catuṣkoṭi logic?)  Or any other currently-unsolved problem in any other part of math?

If you don’t, then my question would be: why single out P vs. NP?

After all, P vs. NP can be expressed as a Π2-sentence: that is, as a certain relationship among positive integers, which either holds or doesn’t hold.  (In this case, the integers would encode Turing machines, polynomial upper bounds on their running time, and an NP-complete problem like 3SAT — all of which are expressible using the basic primitives of arithmetic.)  In terms of its logical form, then, it’s really no different than the Twin Prime Conjecture and so forth.

So then, do you think that statements of arithmetic, like there being no prime number between 24 and 28, might also be like the Parallel Postulate?  That there might be some other, equally-valid “non-Euclidean arithmetic” where there is a prime between 24 and 28?  What exactly would one mean by that?  I understand exactly what one means by non-Euclidean geometries, but to my mind, geometry is less “fundamental” (at least in a logical sense) than positive integers are.  And of course, even if one believes that non-Euclidean geometries are just as “fundamental” as Euclidean geometry — an argument that seems harder to make for, say, the positive integers versus the Gaussian integers or finite fields or p-adics  — that still doesn’t change the fact that questions about Euclidean geometry have definite right answers.

Let me acknowledge two important caveats to what I said:

First, it’s certainly possible that P vs. NP might be independent of standard formal systems like ZF set theory (i.e., neither provable nor disprovable in them).  That’s a possibility that everyone acknowledges, even if (like me) they consider it rather unlikely.  But note that, even if P vs. NP were independent of our standard formal systems, that still wouldn’t mean that the question was ill-posed!  There would still either be a Turing machine that decided 3SAT in polynomial time, or else there wouldn’t be.  It would “only” mean that the usual axioms of set theory wouldn’t suffice to tell us which.

The second caveat is that P vs. NP, like any other mathematical question, can be generalized and extended in all sorts of interesting ways.  So for example, one can define analogues of P vs. NP over the reals and complex numbers (which are also currently open, but which might be easier than the Boolean version).  Or, even if P≠NP, one can still ask if randomized algorithms, or nonuniform algorithms, or quantum algorithms, might be able to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.  Or one can ask whether NP-complete problems are at least efficiently solvable “on average,” if not in the worst case.  Every one of these questions has been actively researched, and you could make a case that some of them are just as interesting as the original P vs. NP question, if not more interesting — if history had turned out a little different, any one of these might have been what we’d taken as our “flagship” question, rather than P vs. NP.  But again, this still doesn’t change the fact that the original P vs. NP question has some definite answer (like, for example, P≠NP…), even if we can’t prove which answer it is, even if we won’t be able to prove it for 500 years.

And please keep in mind that, if P vs. NP were solved after being open for hundreds of years, it would be far from the first such mathematical problem!  Fermat’s Last Theorem stayed open for 350 years, and the impossibility of squaring the circle and trisecting the angle were open for more than 2000 years.  Any time before these problems were solved, one could’ve said that maybe people had failed because the question itself was ill-posed, but one would’ve been mistaken.  People simply hadn’t invented the right ideas yet.

Best regards,
Scott

Unrelated Announcements: As most of you have probably seen, Subhash Khot won the Nevanlinna Prize, while Maryam Mirzakhani, Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava and Martin Hairer won the Fields Medal. Mirzakhani is the first female Fields Medalist. Congratulations to all!

Also, I join the rest of the world in saying that Robin Williams was a great actor—there was no one better at playing “the Robin Williams role” in any given movie—and his loss is a loss for humanity.

### The Power of the Digi-Comp II: My First Conscious Paperlet

Friday, July 4th, 2014

Foreword: Right now, I have a painfully-large stack of unwritten research papers.  Many of these are “paperlets”: cool things I noticed that I want to tell people about, but that would require a lot more development before they became competitive for any major theoretical computer science conference.  And what with the baby, I simply don’t have time anymore for the kind of obsessive, single-minded, all-nighter-filled effort needed to bulk my paperlets up.  So starting today, I’m going to try turning some of my paperlets into blog posts.  I don’t mean advertisements or sneak previews for papers, but replacements for papers: blog posts that constitute the entirety of what I have to say for now about some research topic.  “Peer reviewing” (whether signed or anonymous) can take place in the comments section, and “citation” can be done by URL.  The hope is that, much like with 17th-century scientists who communicated results by letter, this will make it easier to get my paperlets done: after all, I’m not writing Official Papers, just blogging for colleagues and friends.

Of course, I’ve often basically done this before—as have many other academic bloggers—but now I’m going to go about it more consciously.  I’ve thought for years that the Internet would eventually change the norms of scientific publication much more radically than it so far has: that yes, instant-feedback tools like blogs and StackExchange and MathOverflow might have another decade or two at the periphery of progress, but their eventual destiny is at the center.  And now that I have tenure, it hit me that I can do more than prognosticate about such things.  I’ll start small: I won’t go direct-to-blog for big papers, papers that cry out for LaTeX formatting, or joint papers.  I certainly won’t do it for papers with students who need official publications for their professional advancement.  But for things like today’s post—on the power of a wooden mechanical computer now installed in the lobby of the building where I work—I hope you agree that the Science-by-Blog Plan fits well.

Oh, by the way, happy July 4th to American readers!  I hope you find that a paperlet about the logspace-interreducibility of a few not-very-well-known computational models captures everything that the holiday is about.

## The Power of the Digi-Comp II

by Scott Aaronson

### Abstract

I study the Digi-Comp II, a wooden mechanical computer whose only moving parts are balls, switches, and toggles.  I show that the problem of simulating (a natural abstraction of) the Digi-Comp, with a polynomial number of balls, is complete for CC (Comparator Circuit), a complexity class defined by Subramanian in 1990 that sits between NL and P.  This explains why the Digi-Comp is capable of addition, multiplication, division, and other arithmetical tasks, and also implies new tasks of which the Digi-Comp is capable (and that indeed are complete for it), including the Stable Marriage Problem, finding a lexicographically-first perfect matching, and the simulation of other Digi-Comps.  However, it also suggests that the Digi-Comp is not a universal computer (not even in the circuit sense), making it a very interesting way to fall short of Turing-universality.  I observe that even with an exponential number of balls, simulating the Digi-Comp remains in P, but I leave open the problem of pinning down its complexity more precisely.

### Introduction

To celebrate his 60th birthday, my colleague Charles Leiserson (who some of you might know as the “L” in the CLRS algorithms textbook) had a striking contraption installed in the lobby of the MIT Stata Center.  That contraption, pictured below, is a custom-built, supersized version of a wooden mechanical computer from the 1960s called the Digi-Comp II, now manufactured and sold by a company called Evil Mad Scientist.

Click here for a short video showing the Digi-Comp’s operation (and here for the user’s manual).  Basically, the way it works is this: a bunch of balls (little steel balls in the original version, pool balls in the supersized version) start at the top and roll to the bottom, one by one.  On their way down, the balls may encounter black toggles, which route each incoming ball either left or right.  Whenever this happens, the weight of the ball flips the toggle to the opposite setting: so for example, if a ball goes left, then the next ball to encounter the same toggle will go right, and the ball after that will go left, and so on.  The toggles thus maintain a “state” for the computer, with each toggle storing one bit.

Besides the toggles, there are also “switches,” which the user can set at the beginning to route every incoming ball either left or right, and whose settings aren’t changed by the balls.  And then there are various wooden tunnels and ledges, whose function is simply to direct the balls in a desired way as they roll down.  A ball could reach different locations, or even the same location in different ways, depending on the settings of the toggles and switches above that location.  On the other hand, once we fix the toggles and switches, a ball’s motion is completely determined: there’s no random or chaotic element.

“Programming” is done by configuring the toggles and switches in some desired way, then loading a desired number of balls at the top and letting them go.  “Reading the output” can be done by looking at the final configuration of some subset of the toggles.

Whenever a ball reaches the bottom, it hits a lever that causes the next ball to be released from the top.  This ensures that the balls go through the device one at a time, rather than all at once.  As we’ll see, however, this is mainly for aesthetic reasons, and maybe also for the mechanical reason that the toggles wouldn’t work properly if two or more balls hit them at once.  The actual logic of the machine doesn’t care about the timing of the balls; the sheer number of balls that go through is all that matters.

The Digi-Comp II, as sold, contains a few other features: most notably, toggles that can be controlled by other toggles (or switches).  But I’ll defer discussion of that feature to later.  As we’ll see, we already get a quite interesting model of computation without it.

One final note: of course the machine that’s sold has a fixed size and a fixed geometry.  But for theoretical purposes, it’s much more interesting to consider an arbitrary network of toggles and switches (not necessarily even planar!), with arbitrary size, and with an arbitrary number of balls fed into it.  (I’ll give a more formal definition in the next section.)

### The Power of the Digi-Comp

So, what exactly can the Digi-Comp do?  As a first exercise, you should convince yourself that, by simply putting a bunch of toggles in a line and initializing them all to “L” (that is, Left), it’s easy to set up a binary counter.  In other words, starting from the configuration, say, LLL (in which three toggles all point left), as successive balls pass through we can enter the configurations RLL, LRL, RRL, etc.  If we interpret L as 0 and R as 1, and treat the first bit as the least significant, then we’re simply counting from 0 to 7 in binary.  With 20 toggles, we could instead count to 1,048,575.

But counting is not the most interesting thing we can do.  As Charles eagerly demonstrated to me, we can also set up the Digi-Comp to perform binary addition, binary multiplication, sorting, and even long division.  (Excruciatingly slowly, of course: the Digi-Comp might need even more work to multiply 3×5, than existing quantum computers need to factor the result!)

To me, these demonstrations served only as proof that, while Charles might call himself a theoretical computer scientist, he’s really a practical person at heart.  Why?  Because a theorist would know that the real question is not what the Digi-Comp can do, but rather what it can’t do!  In particular, do we have a universal computer on our hands here, or not?

If the answer is yes, then it’s amazing that such a simple contraption of balls and toggles could already take us over the threshold of universality.  Universality would immediately explain why the Digi-Comp is capable of multiplication, division, sorting, and so on.  If, on the other hand, we don’t have universality, that too is extremely interesting—for we’d then face the challenge of explaining how the Digi-Comp can do so many things without being universal.

It might be said that the Digi-Comp is certainly not a universal computer, since if nothing else, it’s incapable of infinite loops.  Indeed, the number of steps that a given Digi-Comp can execute is bounded by the number of balls, while the number of bits it can store is bounded by the number of toggles: clearly we don’t have a Turing machine.  This is true, but doesn’t really tell us what we want to know.  For, as discussed in my last post, we can consider not only Turing-machine universality, but also the weaker (but still interesting) notion of circuit-universality.  The latter means the ability to simulate, with reasonable efficiency, any Boolean circuit of AND, OR, and NOT gates—and hence, in particular, to compute any Boolean function on any fixed number of input bits (given enough resources), or to simulate any polynomial-time Turing machine (given polynomial resources).

The formal way to ask whether something is circuit-universal, is to ask whether the problem of simulating the thing is P-complete.  Here P-complete (not to be confused with NP-complete!) basically means the following:

There exists a polynomial p such that any S-step Turing machine computation—or equivalently, any Boolean circuit with at most S gates—can be embedded into our system if we allow the use of poly(S) computing elements (in our case, balls, toggles, and switches).

Of course, I need to tell you what I mean by the weasel phrase “can be embedded into.”  After all, it wouldn’t be too impressive if the Digi-Comp could “solve” linear programming, primality testing, or other highly-nontrivial problems, but only via “embeddings” in which we had to do essentially all the work, just to decide how to configure the toggles and switches!  The standard way to handle this issue is to demand that the embedding be “computationally simple”: that is, we should be able to carry out the embedding in L (logarithmic space), or some other complexity class believed to be much smaller than the class (P, in this case) for which we’re trying to prove completeness.  That way, we’ll be able to say that our device really was “doing something essential”—i.e., something that our embedding procedure couldn’t efficiently do for itself—unless the larger complexity class collapses with the smaller one (i.e., unless L=P).

So then, our question is whether simulating the Digi-Comp II is a P-complete problem under L-reductions, or alternatively, whether the problem is in some complexity class believed to be smaller than P.  The one last thing we need is a formal definition of “the problem of simulating the Digi-Comp II.”  Thus, let DIGICOMP be the following problem:

We’re given as inputs:

• A directed acyclic graph G, with n vertices.  There is a designated vertex with indegree 0 and outdegree 1 called the “source,” and a designated vertex with indegree 1 and outdegree 0 called the “sink.”  Every internal vertex v (that is, every vertex with both incoming and outgoing edges) has exactly two outgoing edges, labeled “L” (left) and “R” (right), as well as one bit of internal state s(v)∈{L,R}.
• For each vertex v, an “initial” value for its internal state s(v).
• A positive integer T (encoded in unary notation), representing the number of balls dropped successively from the source vertex.

Computation proceeds as follows: each time a ball appears at the source vertex, it traverses the path induced by the L and R states of the vertices that it encounters, until it reaches a terminal vertex, which might or might not be the sink.  As the ball traverses the path, it flips s(v) for each vertex v that it encounters: L goes to R and R goes to L.  Then the next ball is dropped in.

The problem is to decide whether any balls reach the sink.

Here the internal vertices represent toggles, and the source represents the chute at the top from which the balls drop.  Switches aren’t included, since (by definition) the reduction can simply fix their values to “L” to “R” and thereby simplify the graph.

Of course we could consider other problems: for example, the problem of deciding whether an odd number of balls reach the sink, or of counting how many balls reach the sink, or of computing the final value of every state-variable s(v).  However, it’s not hard to show that all of these problems are interreducible with the DIGICOMP problem as defined above.

### The Class CC

My main result, in this paperlet, is to pin down the complexity of the DIGICOMP problem in terms of a complexity class called CC (Comparator Circuit): a class that’s obscure enough not to be in the Complexity Zoo (!), but that’s been studied in several papers.  CC was defined by Subramanian in his 1990 Stanford PhD thesis; around the same time Mayr and Subramanian showed the inclusion NL ⊆ CC (the inclusion CC ⊆ P is immediate).  Recently Cook, Filmus, and Lê revived interest in CC with their paper The Complexity of the Comparator Circuit Value Problem, which is probably the best current source of information about this class.

OK, so what is CC?  Informally, it’s the class of problems that you can solve using a comparator circuit, which is a circuit that maps n bits of input to n bits of output, and whose only allowed operation is to sort any desired pair of bits.  That is, a comparator circuit can repeatedly apply the transformation (x,y)→(x∧y,x∨y), in which 00, 01, and 11 all get mapped to themselves, while 10 gets mapped to 01.  Note that there’s no facility in the circuit for copying bits (i.e., for fanout), so sorting could irreversibly destroy information about the input.  In the comparator circuit value problem (or CCV), we’re given as input a description of a comparator circuit C, along with an input x∈{0,1}n and an index i∈[n]; then the problem is to determine the final value of the ith bit when C is applied to x.  Then CC is simply the class of all languages that are L-reducible to CCV.

As Cook et al. discuss, there are various other characterizations of CC: for example, rather than using a complete problem, we can define CC directly as the class of languages computed by uniform families of comparator circuits.  More strikingly, Mayr and Subramanian showed that CC has natural complete problems, which include (decision versions of) the famous Stable Marriage Problem, as well as finding the lexicographically first perfect matching in a bipartite graph.  So perhaps the most appealing definition of CC is that it’s “the class of problems that can be easily mapped to the Stable Marriage Problem.”

It’s a wide-open problem whether CC=NL or CC=P: as usual, one can give oracle separations, but as far as anyone knows, either equality could hold without any dramatic implications for “standard” complexity classes.  (Of course, the conjunction of these equalities would have a dramatic implication.)  What got Cook et al. interested was that CC isn’t even known to contain (or be contained in) the class NC of parallelizable problems.  In particular, linear-algebra problems in NC, like determinant, matrix inversion, and iterated matrix multiplication—not to mention other problems in P, like linear programming and greatest common divisor—might all be examples of problems that are efficiently solvable by Boolean circuits, but not by comparator circuits.

One final note about CC.  Cook et al. showed the existence of a universal comparator circuit: that is, a single comparator circuit C able to simulate any other comparator circuit C’ of some fixed size, given a description of C’ as part of its input.

### DIGICOMP is CC-Complete

I can now proceed to my result: that, rather surprisingly, the Digi-Comp II can solve exactly the problems in CC, giving us another characterization of that class.

I’ll prove this using yet another model of computation, which I call the pebbles model.  In the pebbles model, you start out with a pile of x pebbles; the positive integer x is the “input” to your computation.  Then you’re allowed to apply a straight-line program that consists entirely of the following two operations:

1. Given any pile of y pebbles, you can split it into two piles consisting of ⌈y/2⌉ and ⌊y/2⌋ pebbles respectively.
2. Given any two piles, consisting of y and z pebbles respectively, you can combine them into a single pile consisting of y+z pebbles.

Your program “accepts” if and only if some designated output pile contains at least one pebble (or, in a variant that can be shown to be equivalent, if it contains an odd number of pebbles).

As suggested by the imagery, you don’t get to make “backup copies” of the piles before splitting or combining them: if, for example, you merge y with z to create y+z, then y isn’t also available to be split into ⌈y/2⌉ and ⌊y/2⌋.

Note that the ceiling and floor functions are the only “nonlinear” elements of the pebbles model: if not for them, we’d simply be applying a sequence of linear transformations.

I can now divide my CC-completeness proof into two parts: first, that DIGICOMP (i.e., the problem of simulating the Digi-Comp II) is equivalent to the pebbles model, and second, that the pebbles model is equivalent to comparator circuits.

Let’s first show the equivalence between DIGICOMP and pebbles.  The reduction is simply this: in a given Digi-Comp, each edge will be associated to a pile, with the number of pebbles in the pile equal to the total number of balls that ever traverse that edge.  Thus, we have T balls dropped in to the edge incident to the source vertex, corresponding to an initial pile with T pebbles.  Multiple edges pointing to the same vertex (i.e., fan-in) can be modeled by combining the associated piles into a single pile.  Meanwhile, a toggle has the effect of splitting a pile: if y balls enter the toggle in total, then ⌈y/2⌉ balls will ultimately exit in whichever direction the toggle was pointing initially (whether left or right), and ⌊y/2⌋ balls will ultimately exit in the other direction.  It’s clear that this equivalence works in both directions: not only does it let us simulate any given Digi-Comp by a pebble program, it also lets us simulate any pebble program by a suitably-designed Digi-Comp.

OK, next let’s show the equivalence between pebbles and comparator circuits.  As a first step, given any comparator circuit, I claim that we can simulate it by a pebble program.  The way to do it is simply to use a pile of 0 pebbles to represent each “0” bit, and a pile of 1 pebble to represent each “1” bit.  Then, any time we want to sort two bits, we simply merge their corresponding piles, then split the result back into two piles.  The result?  00 gets mapped to 00, 11 gets mapped to 11, and 01 and 10 both get mapped to one pebble in the ⌈y/2⌉ pile and zero pebbles in the ⌊y/2⌋ pile.  At the end, a given pile will have a pebble in it if and only if the corresponding output bit in the comparator circuit is 1.

One might worry that the input to a comparator circuit is a sequence of bits, whereas I said before that the input to a pebble program is just a single pile.  However, it’s not hard to see that we can deal with this, without leaving the world of logspace reductions, by breaking up an initial pile of n pebbles into n piles each of zero pebbles or one pebble, corresponding to any desired n-bit string (along with some extra pebbles, which we subsequently ignore).  Alternatively, we could generalize the pebbles model so that the input can consist of multiple piles.  One can show, by a similar “breaking-up” trick, that this wouldn’t affect the pebbles model’s equivalence to the DIGICOMP problem.

Finally, given a pebble program, I need to show how to simulate it by a comparator circuit.  The reduction works as follows: let T be the number of pebbles we’re dealing with (or even just an upper bound on that number).  Then each pile will be represented by its own group of T wires in the comparator circuit.  The Hamming weight of those T wires—i.e., the number of them that contain a ‘1’ bit—will equal the number of pebbles in the corresponding pile.

To merge two piles, we first merge the corresponding groups of T wires.  We then use comparator gates to sort the bits in those 2T wires, until all the ‘1’ bits have been moved into the first T wires.  Finally, we ignore the remaining T wires for the remainder of the computation.

To split a pile, we first use comparator gates to sort the bits in the T wires, until all the ‘1’ bits have been moved to the left.  We then route all the odd-numbered wires into “Pile A” (the one that’s supposed to get ⌈y/2⌉ pebbles), and route all the even-numbered wires into “Pile B” (the one that’s supposed to get ⌊y/2⌋ pebbles).  Finally, we introduce T additional wires with 0’s in them, so that piles A and B have T wires each.

At the end, by examining the leftmost wire in the group of wires corresponding to the output pile, we can decide whether that pile ends up with any pebbles in it.

Since it’s clear that all of the above transformations can be carried out in logspace (or even smaller complexity classes), this completes the proof that DIGICOMP is CC-complete under L-reductions.  As corollaries, the Stable Marriage and lexicographically-first perfect matching problems are L-reducible to DIGICOMP—or informally, are solvable by easily-described, polynomial-size Digi-Comp machines (and indeed, characterize the power of such machines).  Combining my result with the universality result of Cook et al., a second corollary is that there exists a “universal Digi-Comp”: that is, a single Digi-Comp D that can simulate any other Digi-Comp D’ of some polynomially-smaller size, so long as we initialize some subset of the toggles in D to encode a description of D’.

### How Does the Digi-Comp Avoid Universality?

Let’s now step back and ask: given that the Digi-Comp is able to do so many things—division, Stable Marriage, bipartite matching—how does it fail to be a universal computer, at least a circuit-universal one?  Is the Digi-Comp a counterexample to the oft-repeated claims of people like Stephen Wolfram, about the ubiquity of universal computation and the difficulty of avoiding it in any sufficiently complex system?  What would need to be added to the Digi-Comp to make it circuit-universal?  Of course, we can ask the same questions about pebble programs and comparator circuits, now that we know that they’re all computationally equivalent.

The reason for the failure of universality is perhaps easiest to see in the case of comparator circuits.  As Steve Cook pointed out in a talk, comparator circuits are “1-Lipschitz“: that is, if you have a comparator circuit acting on n input bits, and you change one of the input bits, your change can affect at most one output bit.  Why?  Well, trace through the circuit and use induction.  So in particular, there’s no amplification of small effects in comparator circuits, no chaos, no sensitive dependence on initial conditions, no whatever you want to call it.  Now, while chaos doesn’t suffice for computational universality, at least naïvely it’s a necessary condition, since there exist computations that are chaotic.  Of course, this simpleminded argument can’t be all there is to it, since otherwise we would’ve proved CCP.  What the argument does show is that, if CC=P, then the encoding of a Boolean circuit into a comparator circuit (or maybe into a collection of such circuits) would need to be subtle and non-obvious: it would need to take computations with the potential for chaos, and reduce them to computations without that potential.

Once we understand this 1-Lipschitz business, we can also see it at work in the pebbles model.  Given a pebble program, suppose someone surreptitiously removed a single pebble from one of the initial piles.  For want of that pebble, could the whole kingdom be lost?  Not really.  Indeed, you can convince yourself that the output will be exactly the same as before, except that one output pile will have one fewer pebble than it would have otherwise.  The reason is again an induction: if you change x by 1, that affects at most one of ⌈x/2⌉ and ⌊x/2⌋ (and likewise, merging two piles affects at most one pile).

We now see the importance of the point I made earlier, about there being no facility in the piles model for “copying” a pile.  If we could copy piles, then the 1-Lipschitz property would fail.  And indeed, it’s not hard to show that in that case, we could implement AND, OR, and NOT gates with arbitrary fanout, and would therefore have a circuit-universal computer.  Likewise, if we could copy bits, then comparator circuits—which, recall, map (x,y) to (x∧y,x∨y)—would implement AND, OR, and NOT with arbitrary fanout, and would be circuit-universal.  (If you’re wondering how to implement NOT: one way to do it is to use what’s known in quantum computing as the “dual-rail representation,” where each bit b is encoded by two bits, one for b and the other for ¬b.  Then a NOT can be accomplished simply by swapping those bits.  And it’s not hard to check that comparator gates in a comparator circuit, and combining and splitting two piles in a pebble program, can achieve the desired updates to both the b rails and the ¬b rails when an AND or OR gate is applied.  However, we could also just omit NOT gates entirely, and use the fact that computing the output of even a monotone Boolean circuit is a P-complete problem under L-reductions.)

In summary, then, the inability to amplify small effects seems like an excellent candidate for the central reason why the power of comparator circuits and pebble programs hits a ceiling at CC, and doesn’t go all the way up to P.  It’s interesting, in this connection, that while transistors (and before them, vacuum tubes) can be used to construct logic gates, the original purpose of both of them was simply to amplify information: to transform a small signal into a large one.  Thus, we might say, comparator circuits and pebble programs fail to be computationally universal because they lack transistors or other amplifiers.

I’d like to apply exactly the same analysis to the Digi-Comp itself: that is, I’d like to say that the reason the Digi-Comp fails to be universal (unless CC=P) is that it, too, lacks the ability to amplify small effects (wherein, for example, the drop of a single ball would unleash a cascade of other balls).  In correspondence, however, David Deutsch pointed out a problem: namely, if we just watch a Digi-Comp in action, then it certainly looks like it has an amplification capability!  Consider, for example, the binary counter discussed earlier.  Suppose a column of ten toggles is in the configuration RRRRRRRRRR, representing the integer 1023.  Then the next ball to fall down will hit all ten toggles in sequence, resetting them to LLLLLLLLLL (and thus, resetting the counter to 0).  Why isn’t this precisely the amplification of a small effect that we were looking for?

Well, maybe it’s amplification, but it’s not of a kind that does what we want computationally.  One way to see the difficulty is that we can’t take all those “L” settings we’ve produced as output, and feed them as inputs to further gates in an arbitrary way.  We could do it if the toggles were arranged in parallel, but they’re arranged serially, so that flipping any one toggle inevitably has the potential also to flip the toggles below it.  Deutsch describes this as a “failure of composition”: in some sense, we do have a fan-out or copying operation, but the design of the Digi-Comp prevents us from composing the fan-out operation with other operations in arbitrary ways, and in particular, in the ways that would be needed to simulate any Boolean circuit.

So, what features could we add to the Digi-Comp to make it universal?  Here’s the simplest possibility I was able to come up with: suppose that, scattered throughout the device, there were balls precariously perched on ledges, in such a way that whenever one was hit by another ball, it would get dislodged, and both balls would continue downward.  We could, of course, chain several of these together, so that the two balls would in turn dislodge four balls, the four would dislodge eight, and so on.  I invite you to check that this would provide the desired fan-out gate, which, when combined with AND, OR, and NOT gates that we know how to implement (e.g., in the dual-rail representation described previously), would allow us to simulate arbitrary Boolean circuits.  In effect, the precariously perched balls would function as “transistors” (of course, painfully slow transistors, and ones that have to be laboriously reloaded with a ball after every use).

As a second possibility, Charles Leiserson points out to me that the Digi-Comp, as sold, has a few switches and toggles that can be controlled by other toggles.  Depending on exactly how one modeled this feature, it’s possible that it, too, could let us implement arbitrary fan-out gates, and thereby boost the Digi-Comp up to circuit-universality.

### Open Problems

My personal favorite open problem is this:

What is the complexity of simulating a Digi-Comp II if the total number of balls dropped in is exponential, rather than polynomial?  (In other words, if the positive integer T, representing the number of balls, is encoded in binary rather than in unary?)

From the equivalence between the Digi-Comp and pebble programs, we can already derive a conclusion about the above problem that’s not intuitively obvious: namely, that it’s in P.  Or to say it another way: it’s possible to predict the exact state of a Digi-Comp with n toggles, after T balls have passed through it, using poly(n, log T) computation steps.  The reason is simply that, if there are T balls, then the total number of balls that pass through any given edge (the only variable we need to track) can be specified using log2T bits.  This, incidentally, gives us a second sense in which the Digi-Comp is not a universal computer: namely, even if we let the machine “run for exponential time” (that is, drop exponentially many balls into it), unlike a conventional digital computer it can’t possibly solve all problems in PSPACE, unless P=PSPACE.

However, this situation also presents us with a puzzle: if we let DIGICOMPEXP be the problem of simulating a Digi-Comp with an exponential number of balls, then it’s clear that DIGICOMPEXP is hard for CC and contained in P, but we lack any information about its difficulty more precise than that.  At present, I regard both extremes—that DIGICOMPEXP is in CC (and hence, no harder than ordinary DIGICOMP), and that it’s P-complete—as within the realm of possibility (along with the possibility that DIGICOMPEXP is intermediate between the two).

By analogy, one can also consider comparator circuits where the entities that get compared are integers from 1 to T rather than bits—and one can then consider the power of such circuits, when T is allowed to grow exponentially.  In email correspondence, however, Steve Cook sent me a proof that such circuits have the same power as standard, Boolean comparator circuits.  It’s not clear whether this tells us anything about the power of a Digi-Comp with exponentially many balls.

A second open problem is to formalize the feature of Digi-Comp that Charles mentioned—namely, toggles and switches controlled by other toggles—and see whether, under some reasonable formalization, that feature bumps us up to P-completeness (i.e., to circuit-universality).  Personally, though, I confess I’d be even more interested if there were some feature we could add to the machine that gave us a larger class than CC, but that still wasn’t all of P.

A third problem is to pin down the power of Digi-Comps (or pebble programs, or comparator circuits) that are required to be planar.  While my experience with woodcarving is limited, I imagine that planar or near-planar graphs are a lot easier to carve than arbitrary graphs (even if the latter present no problems of principle).

A fourth problem has to do with the class CC in general, rather than the Digi-Comp in particular, but I can’t resist mentioning it.  Let CCEXP be the complexity class that’s just like CC, but where the comparator circuit (or pebble program, or Digi-Comp) is exponentially large and specified only implicitly (that is, by a Boolean circuit that, given as input a binary encoding of an integer i, tells you the ith bit of the comparator circuit’s description).  Then it’s easy to see that PSPACE ⊆ CCEXP ⊆ EXP.  Do we have CCEXP = PSPACE or CCEXP = EXP?  If not, then CCEXP would be the first example I’ve ever seen of a natural complexity class intermediate between PSPACE and EXP.

### Acknowledgments

I thank Charles Leiserson for bringing the Digi-Comp II to MIT, and thereby inspiring this “research.”  I also thank Steve Cook, both for giving a talk that first brought the complexity class CC to my attention, and for helpful correspondence.  Finally I thank David Deutsch for the point about composition.

### A Physically Universal Cellular Automaton

Thursday, June 26th, 2014

It’s been understood for decades that, if you take a simple discrete rule—say, a cellular automaton like Conway’s Game of Life—and iterate it over and over, you can very easily get the capacity for universal computation.  In other words, your cellular automaton becomes able to implement any desired sequence of AND, OR, and NOT gates, store and retrieve bits in a memory, and even (in principle) run Windows or Linux, albeit probably veerrryyy sloowwllyyy, using a complicated contraption of thousands or millions of cells to represent each bit of the desired computation.  If I’m not mistaken, a guy named Wolfram even wrote an entire 1200-page-long book about this phenomenon (see here for my 2002 review).

But suppose we want more than mere computational universality.  Suppose we want “physical” universality: that is, the ability to implement any transformation whatsoever on any finite region of the cellular automaton’s state, by suitably initializing the complement of that region.  So for example, suppose that, given some 1000×1000 square of cells, we’d like to replace every “0” cell within that square by a “1” cell, and vice versa.  Then physical universality would mean that we could do that, eventually, by some “machine” we could build outside the 1000×1000 square of interest.

You might wonder: are we really asking for more here than just ordinary computational universality?  Indeed we are.  To see this, consider Conway’s famous Game of Life.  Even though Life has been proved to be computationally universal, it’s not physically universal in the above sense.  The reason is simply that Life’s evolution rule is not time-reversible.  So if, for example, there were a lone “1” cell deep inside the 1000×1000 square, surrounded by a sea of “0” cells, then that “1” cell would immediately disappear without a trace, and no amount of machinery outside the square could possibly detect that it was ever there.

Furthermore, even cellular automata that are both time-reversible and computationally universal could fail to be physically universal.  Suppose, for example, that our CA allowed for the construction of “impenetrable walls,” through which no signal could pass.  And suppose that our 1000×1000 region contained a hollow box built out of these impenetrable walls.  Then, by definition, no amount of machinery that we built outside the region could ever detect whether there was a particle bouncing around inside the box.

So, in summary, we now face a genuinely new question:

Does there exist a physically universal cellular automaton, or not?

This question had sort of vaguely bounced around in my head (and probably other people’s) for years.  But as far as I know, it was first asked, clearly and explicitly, in a lovely 2010 preprint by Dominik Janzing.

Today, I’m proud to report that Luke Schaeffer, a first-year PhD student in my group, has answered Janzing’s question in the affirmative, by constructing the first cellular automaton (again, to the best of our knowledge) that’s been proved to be physically universal.  Click here for Luke’s beautifully-written preprint about his construction, and click here for a webpage that he’s prepared, explaining the details of the construction using color figures and videos.  Even if you don’t have time to get into the nitty-gritty, the videos on the webpage should give you a sense for the intricacy of what he accomplished.

Very briefly, Luke first defines a reversible, two-dimensional CA involving particles that move diagonally across a square lattice, in one of four possible directions (northeast, northwest, southeast, or southwest).  The number of particles is always conserved.  The only interesting behavior occurs when three of the particles “collide” in a single 2×2 square, and Luke gives rules (symmetric under rotations and reflections) that specify what happens then.

Given these rules, it’s possible to prove that any configuration whatsoever of finitely many particles will “diffuse,” after not too many time steps, into four unchanging clouds of particles, which thereafter simply move away from each other in the four diagonal directions for all eternity.  This has the interesting consequence that Luke’s CA, when initialized with finitely many particles, cannot be capable of universal computation in Turing’s sense.  In other words, there’s no way, using n initial particles confined to an n×n box, to set up a computation that continues to do something interesting after 2n or 22^n time steps, let alone forever. On the other hand, using finitely many particles, one can also prove that the CA can perform universal computation in the Boolean circuit sense.  In other words, we can implement AND, OR, and NOT gates, and by chaining them together, can compute any Boolean function that we like on any fixed number of input bits (with the number of input bits generally much smaller than the number of particles).  And this “circuit universality,” rather than Turing-machine universality, is all that’s implied anyway by physical universality in Janzing’s sense.  (As a side note, the distinction between circuit and Turing-machine universality seems to deserve much more attention than it usually gets.)

Anyway, while the “diffusion into four clouds” aspect of Luke’s CA might seem annoying, it turns out to be extremely useful for proving physical universality.  For it has the consequence that, no matter what the initial state was inside the square we cared about, that state will before too long be encoded into the states of four clouds headed away from the square.  So then, “all” we need to do is engineer some additional clouds of particles, initially outside the square, that

1. intercept the four escaping clouds,
2. “decode” the contents of those clouds into a flat sequence of bits,
3. apply an arbitrary Boolean circuit to that bit sequence, and then
4. convert the output bits of the Boolean circuit into new clouds of particles converging back onto the square.

So, well … that’s exactly what Luke did.  And just in case there’s any doubt about the correctness of the end result, Luke actually implemented his construction in the cellular-automaton simulator Golly, where you can try it out yourself (he explains how on his webpage).

So far, of course, I’ve skirted past the obvious question of “why.”  Who cares that we now know that there exists a physically-universal CA?  Apart from the sheer intrinsic coolness, a second reason is that I’ve been interested for years in how to make finer (but still computer-sciencey) distinctions, among various “candidate laws of physics,” than simply saying that some laws are computationally universal and others aren’t, or some are easy to simulate on a standard Turing machine and others hard.  For ironically, the very pervasiveness of computational universality (the thing Wolfram goes on and on about) makes it of limited usefulness in distinguishing physical laws: almost any sufficiently-interesting set of laws will turn out to be computationally universal, at least in the circuit sense if not the Turing-machine one!

On the other hand, many of these laws will be computationally universal only because of extremely convoluted constructions, which fall apart if even the tiniest error is introduced.  And in other cases, we’ll be able to build a universal computer, all right, but that computer will be relatively impotent to obtain interesting input about its physical environment, or to make its output affect the gross features of the CA’s physical state.  If you like, we’ll have a recipe for creating a universe full of ivory-tower, eggheaded nerds, who can search for counterexamples to Goldbach’s Conjecture but can’t build a shelter to protect themselves from a hail of “1” bits, or even learn whether such a hail is present or not, or decide which other part of the CA to travel to.

As I see it, Janzing’s notion of physical universality is directly addressing this “egghead” problem, by asking whether we can build not merely a universal computer but a particularly powerful kind of robot: one that can effect a completely arbitrary transformation (given enough time, of course) on any part of its physical environment.  And the answer turns out to be that, at least in a weird CA consisting of clouds of diagonally-moving particles, we can indeed do that.  The question of whether we can also achieve physical universality in more natural CAs remains open (and in his Future Work section, Luke discusses several ways of formalizing what we mean by “more natural”).

As Luke mentions in his introduction, there’s at least a loose connection here to David Deutsch’s recent notion of constructor theory (see also this followup paper by Deutsch and Chiara Marletto).  Basically, Deutsch and Marletto want to reconstruct all of physics taking what can and can’t be constructed (i.e., what kinds of transformations are possible) as the most primitive concept, rather than (as in ordinary physics) what will or won’t happen (i.e., how the universe’s state evolves with time).  The hope is that, once physics was reconstructed in this way, we could then (for example) state and answer the question of whether or not scalable quantum computers can be built as a principled question of physics, rather than as a “mere” question of engineering.

Now, regardless of what you think about these audacious goals, or about Deutsch and Marletto’s progress (or lack of progress?) so far toward achieving them, it’s certainly a worthwhile project to study what sorts of machines can and can’t be constructed, as a matter of principle, both in the real physical world and in other, hypothetical worlds that capture various aspects of our world.  Indeed, one could say that that’s what many of us in quantum information and theoretical computer science have been trying to do for decades!  However, Janzing’s “physical universality” problem hints at a different way to approach the project: starting with some far-reaching desire (say, to be able to implement any transformation whatsoever on any finite region), can we engineer laws of physics that make that desire possible?  If so, then how close can we make those laws to “our” laws?

Luke has now taken a first stab at answering these questions.  Whether his result ends up merely being a fun, recreational “terminal branch” on the tree of science, or a trunk leading to something more, probably just depends on how interested people get.  I have no doubt that our laws of physics permit the creation of additional papers on this topic, but whether they do or don’t is (as far as I can see) merely a question of contingency and human will, not a constructor-theoretic question.

### CCC’s Declaration of Independence

Friday, June 6th, 2014

Recently, the participants of the Conference on Computational Complexity (CCC)—the latest iteration of which I’ll be speaking at next week in Vancouver—voted to declare their independence from the IEEE, and to become a solo, researcher-organized conference.  See this open letter for the reasons why (basically, IEEE charged a huge overhead, didn’t allow open access to the proceedings, and increased rather than decreased the administrative burden on the organizers).  As a former member of the CCC Steering Committee, I’m in violent agreement with this move, and only wish we’d managed to do it sooner.

Now, Dieter van Melkebeek (the current Steering Committee chair) is asking complexity theorists to sign a public Letter of Support, to make it crystal-clear that the community is behind the move to independence.  And Jeff Kinne has asked me to advertise the letter on my blog.  So, if you’re a complexity theorist who agrees with the move, please go there and sign (it already has 111 signatures, but could use more).

Meanwhile, I wish to express my profound gratitude to Dieter, Jeff, and the other Steering Committee members for their efforts toward independence.  The only thing I might’ve done differently would be to add a little more … I dunno, pizzazz to the documents explaining the reasons for the move.  Like:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for a conference to dissolve the organizational bands that have connected it with the IEEE, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Mathematics and the CCC Charter entitle it, a decent respect to the opinions of theorist-kind requires that the participants should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident (but still in need of proof), that P and NP are created unequal, that one-way functions exist, that the polynomial hierarchy is infinite…

### Quantifying the Rise and Fall of Complexity in Closed Systems: The Coffee Automaton

Tuesday, May 27th, 2014

Update (June 3): A few days after we posted this paper online, Brent Werness, a postdoc in probability theory at the University of Washington, discovered a serious error in the “experimental” part of the paper.  Happily, Brent is now collaborating with us on producing a new version of the paper that fixes the error, which we hope to have available within a few months (and which will replace the version currently on the arXiv).

To make a long story short: while the overall idea, of measuring “apparent complexity” by the compressed file size of a coarse-grained image, is fine, the “interacting coffee automaton” that we study in the paper is not an example where the apparent complexity becomes large at intermediate times.  That fact can be deduced as a corollary of a result of Liggett from 2009 about the “symmetric exclusion process,” and can be seen as a far-reaching generalization of a result that we prove in our paper’s appendix: namely, that in the non-interacting coffee automaton (our “control case”), the apparent complexity after t time steps is upper-bounded by O(log(nt)).  As it turns out, we were more right than we knew to worry about large-deviation bounds giving complete mathematical control over what happens when the cream spills into the coffee, thereby preventing the apparent complexity from ever becoming large!

But what about our numerical results, which showed a small but unmistakable complexity bump for the interacting automaton (figure 10(a) in the paper)?  It now appears that the complexity bump we saw in our data is likely to be explainable by an incomplete removal of what we called “border pixel artifacts”: that is, “spurious” complexity that arises merely from the fact that, at the border between cream and coffee, we need to round the fraction of cream up or down to the nearest integer to produce a grayscale.  In the paper, we devoted a whole section (Section 6) to border pixel artifacts and the need to deal with them: something sufficiently non-obvious that in the comments of this post, you can find people arguing with me that it’s a non-issue.  Well, it now appears that we erred by underestimating the severity of border pixel artifacts, and that a better procedure to get rid of them would also eliminate the complexity bump for the interacting automaton.

Once again, this error has no effect on either the general idea of complexity rising and then falling in closed thermodynamic systems, or our proposal for how to quantify that rise and fall—the two aspects of the paper that have generated the most interest.  But we made a bad choice of model system with which to illustrate those ideas.  Had I looked more carefully at the data, I could’ve noticed the problem before we posted, and I take responsibility for my failure to do so.

The good news is that ultimately, I think the truth only makes our story more interesting.  For it turns out that apparent complexity, as we define it, is not something that’s trivial to achieve by just setting loose a bunch of randomly-walking particles, which bump into each other but are otherwise completely independent.  If you want “complexity” along the approach to thermal equilibrium, you need to work a bit harder for it.  One promising idea, which we’re now exploring, is to consider a cream tendril whose tip takes a random walk through the coffee, leaving a trail of cream in its wake.  Using results in probability theory—closely related, or so I’m told, to the results for which Wendelin Werner won his Fields Medal!—it may even be possible to prove analytically that the apparent complexity becomes large in thermodynamic systems with this sort of behavior, much as one can prove that the complexity doesn’t become large in our original coffee automaton.

So, if you’re interested in this topic, stay tuned for the updated version of our paper.  In the meantime, I wish to express our deepest imaginable gratitude to Brent Werness for telling us all this.

Good news!  After nearly three years of procrastination, fellow blogger Sean Carroll, former MIT undergraduate Lauren Ouellette, and yours truly finally finished a paper with the above title (coming soon to an arXiv near you).  PowerPoint slides are also available (as usual, you’re on your own if you can’t open them—sorry!).

For the background and context of this paper, please see my old post “The First Law of Complexodynamics,” which discussed Sean’s problem of defining a “complextropy” measure that first increases and then decreases in closed thermodynamic systems, in contrast to entropy (which increases monotonically).  In this exploratory paper, we basically do five things:

1. We survey several candidate “complextropy” measures: their strengths, weaknesses, and relations to one another.
2. We propose a model system for studying such measures: a probabilistic cellular automaton that models a cup of coffee into which cream has just been poured.
3. We report the results of numerical experiments with one of the measures, which we call “apparent complexity” (basically, the gzip file size of a smeared-out image of the coffee cup).  The results confirm that the apparent complexity does indeed increase, reach a maximum, then turn around and decrease as the coffee and cream mix.
4. We discuss a technical issue that one needs to overcome (the so-called “border pixels” problem) before one can do meaningful experiments in this area, and offer a solution.
5. We raise the open problem of proving analytically that the apparent complexity ever becomes large for the coffee automaton.  To underscore this problem’s difficulty, we prove that the apparent complexity doesn’t become large in a simplified version of the coffee automaton.

Anyway, here’s the abstract:

In contrast to entropy, which increases monotonically, the “complexity” or “interestingness” of closed systems seems intuitively to increase at first and then decrease as equilibrium is approached. For example, our universe lacked complex structures at the Big Bang and will also lack them after black holes evaporate and particles are dispersed. This paper makes an initial attempt to quantify this pattern. As a model system, we use a simple, two-dimensional cellular automaton that simulates the mixing of two liquids (“coffee” and “cream”). A plausible complexity measure is then the Kolmogorov complexity of a coarse-grained approximation of the automaton’s state, which we dub the “apparent complexity.” We study this complexity measure, and show analytically that it never becomes large when the liquid particles are non-interacting. By contrast, when the particles do interact, we give numerical evidence that the complexity reaches a maximum comparable to the “coffee cup’s” horizontal dimension. We raise the problem of proving this behavior analytically.

Questions and comments more than welcome.

In unrelated news, Shafi Goldwasser has asked me to announce that the Call for Papers for the 2015 Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) conference is now available.

### Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)

Wednesday, May 21st, 2014

Happy birthday to me!

Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed “mathematical theory of consciousness” developed over the past decade by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi.  One of the askers was Max Tegmark, who’s enthusiastically adopted IIT as a plank in his radical mathematizing platform (see his paper “Consciousness as a State of Matter”).  When, in the comment thread about Max’s Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, I expressed doubts about IIT, Max challenged me to back up my doubts with a quantitative calculation.

So, this is the post that I promised to Max and all the others, about why I don’t believe IIT.  And yes, it will contain that quantitative calculation.

But first, what is IIT?  The central ideas of IIT, as I understand them, are:

(1) to propose a quantitative measure, called Φ, of the amount of “integrated information” in a physical system (i.e. information that can’t be localized in the system’s individual parts), and then

(2) to hypothesize that a physical system is “conscious” if and only if it has a large value of Φ—and indeed, that a system is more conscious the larger its Φ value.

I’ll return later to the precise definition of Φ—but basically, it’s obtained by minimizing, over all subdivisions of your physical system into two parts A and B, some measure of the mutual information between A’s outputs and B’s inputs and vice versa.  Now, one immediate consequence of any definition like this is that all sorts of simple physical systems (a thermostat, a photodiode, etc.) will turn out to have small but nonzero Φ values.  To his credit, Tononi cheerfully accepts the panpsychist implication: yes, he says, it really does mean that thermostats and photodiodes have small but nonzero levels of consciousness.  On the other hand, for the theory to work, it had better be the case that Φ is small for “intuitively unconscious” systems, and only large for “intuitively conscious” systems.  As I’ll explain later, this strikes me as a crucial point on which IIT fails.

The literature on IIT is too big to do it justice in a blog post.  Strikingly, in addition to the “primary” literature, there’s now even a “secondary” literature, which treats IIT as a sort of established base on which to build further speculations about consciousness.  Besides the Tegmark paper linked to above, see for example this paper by Maguire et al., and associated popular article.  (Ironically, Maguire et al. use IIT to argue for the Penrose-like view that consciousness might have uncomputable aspects—a use diametrically opposed to Tegmark’s.)

Anyway, if you want to read a popular article about IIT, there are loads of them: see here for the New York Times’s, here for Scientific American‘s, here for IEEE Spectrum‘s, and here for the New Yorker‘s.  Unfortunately, none of those articles will tell you the meat (i.e., the definition of integrated information); for that you need technical papers, like this or this by Tononi, or this by Seth et al.  IIT is also described in Christof Koch’s memoir Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, which I read and enjoyed; as well as Tononi’s Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, which I haven’t yet read.  (Koch, one of the world’s best-known thinkers and writers about consciousness, has also become an evangelist for IIT.)

So, I want to explain why I don’t think IIT solves even the problem that it “plausibly could have” solved.  But before I can do that, I need to do some philosophical ground-clearing.  Broadly speaking, what is it that a “mathematical theory of consciousness” is supposed to do?  What questions should it answer, and how should we judge whether it’s succeeded?

The most obvious thing a consciousness theory could do is to explain why consciousness exists: that is, to solve what David Chalmers calls the “Hard Problem,” by telling us how a clump of neurons is able to give rise to the taste of strawberries, the redness of red … you know, all that ineffable first-persony stuff.  Alas, there’s a strong argument—one that I, personally, find completely convincing—why that’s too much to ask of any scientific theory.  Namely, no matter what the third-person facts were, one could always imagine a universe consistent with those facts in which no one “really” experienced anything.  So for example, if someone claims that integrated information “explains” why consciousness exists—nope, sorry!  I’ve just conjured into my imagination beings whose Φ-values are a thousand, nay a trillion times larger than humans’, yet who are also philosophical zombies: entities that there’s nothing that it’s like to be.  Granted, maybe such zombies can’t exist in the actual world: maybe, if you tried to create one, God would notice its large Φ-value and generously bequeath it a soul.  But if so, then that’s a further fact about our world, a fact that manifestly couldn’t be deduced from the properties of Φ alone.  Notice that the details of Φ are completely irrelevant to the argument.

Faced with this point, many scientifically-minded people start yelling and throwing things.  They say that “zombies” and so forth are empty metaphysics, and that our only hope of learning about consciousness is to engage with actual facts about the brain.  And that’s a perfectly reasonable position!  As far as I’m concerned, you absolutely have the option of dismissing Chalmers’ Hard Problem as a navel-gazing distraction from the real work of neuroscience.  The one thing you can’t do is have it both ways: that is, you can’t say both that the Hard Problem is meaningless, and that progress in neuroscience will soon solve the problem if it hasn’t already.  You can’t maintain simultaneously that

(a) once you account for someone’s observed behavior and the details of their brain organization, there’s nothing further about consciousness to be explained, and

(b) remarkably, the XYZ theory of consciousness can explain the “nothing further” (e.g., by reducing it to integrated information processing), or might be on the verge of doing so.

As obvious as this sounds, it seems to me that large swaths of consciousness-theorizing can just be summarily rejected for trying to have their brain and eat it in precisely the above way.

Fortunately, I think IIT survives the above observations.  For we can easily interpret IIT as trying to do something more “modest” than solve the Hard Problem, although still staggeringly audacious.  Namely, we can say that IIT “merely” aims to tell us which physical systems are associated with consciousness and which aren’t, purely in terms of the systems’ physical organization.  The test of such a theory is whether it can produce results agreeing with “commonsense intuition”: for example, whether it can affirm, from first principles, that (most) humans are conscious; that dogs and horses are also conscious but less so; that rocks, livers, bacteria colonies, and existing digital computers are not conscious (or are hardly conscious); and that a room full of people has no “mega-consciousness” over and above the consciousnesses of the individuals.

The reason it’s so important that the theory uphold “common sense” on these test cases is that, given the experimental inaccessibility of consciousness, this is basically the only test available to us.  If the theory gets the test cases “wrong” (i.e., gives results diverging from common sense), it’s not clear that there’s anything else for the theory to get “right.”  Of course, supposing we had a theory that got the test cases right, we could then have a field day with the less-obvious cases, programming our computers to tell us exactly how much consciousness is present in octopi, fetuses, brain-damaged patients, and hypothetical AI bots.

In my opinion, how to construct a theory that tells us which physical systems are conscious and which aren’t—giving answers that agree with “common sense” whenever the latter renders a verdict—is one of the deepest, most fascinating problems in all of science.  Since I don’t know a standard name for the problem, I hereby call it the Pretty-Hard Problem of Consciousness.  Unlike with the Hard Hard Problem, I don’t know of any philosophical reason why the Pretty-Hard Problem should be inherently unsolvable; but on the other hand, humans seem nowhere close to solving it (if we had solved it, then we could reduce the abortion, animal rights, and strong AI debates to “gentlemen, let us calculate!”).

Now, I regard IIT as a serious, honorable attempt to grapple with the Pretty-Hard Problem of Consciousness: something concrete enough to move the discussion forward.  But I also regard IIT as a failed attempt on the problem.  And I wish people would recognize its failure, learn from it, and move on.

In my view, IIT fails to solve the Pretty-Hard Problem because it unavoidably predicts vast amounts of consciousness in physical systems that no sane person would regard as particularly “conscious” at all: indeed, systems that do nothing but apply a low-density parity-check code, or other simple transformations of their input data.  Moreover, IIT predicts not merely that these systems are “slightly” conscious (which would be fine), but that they can be unboundedly more conscious than humans are.

To justify that claim, I first need to define Φ.  Strikingly, despite the large literature about Φ, I had a hard time finding a clear mathematical definition of it—one that not only listed formulas but fully defined the structures that the formulas were talking about.  Complicating matters further, there are several competing definitions of Φ in the literature, including ΦDM (discrete memoryless), ΦE (empirical), and ΦAR (autoregressive), which apply in different contexts (e.g., some take time evolution into account and others don’t).  Nevertheless, I think I can define Φ in a way that will make sense to theoretical computer scientists.  And crucially, the broad point I want to make about Φ won’t depend much on the details of its formalization anyway.

We consider a discrete system in a state x=(x1,…,xn)∈Sn, where S is a finite alphabet (the simplest case is S={0,1}).  We imagine that the system evolves via an “updating function” f:Sn→Sn. Then the question that interests us is whether the xi‘s can be partitioned into two sets A and B, of roughly comparable size, such that the updates to the variables in A don’t depend very much on the variables in B and vice versa.  If such a partition exists, then we say that the computation of f does not involve “global integration of information,” which on Tononi’s theory is a defining aspect of consciousness.

More formally, given a partition (A,B) of {1,…,n}, let us write an input y=(y1,…,yn)∈Sn to f in the form (yA,yB), where yA consists of the y variables in A and yB consists of the y variables in B.  Then we can think of f as mapping an input pair (yA,yB) to an output pair (zA,zB).  Now, we define the “effective information” EI(A→B) as H(zB | A random, yB=xB).  Or in words, EI(A→B) is the Shannon entropy of the output variables in B, if the input variables in A are drawn uniformly at random, while the input variables in B are fixed to their values in x.  It’s a measure of the dependence of B on A in the computation of f(x).  Similarly, we define

EI(B→A) := H(zA | B random, yA=xA).

We then consider the sum

Φ(A,B) := EI(A→B) + EI(B→A).

Intuitively, we’d like the integrated information Φ=Φ(f,x) be the minimum of Φ(A,B), over all 2n-2 possible partitions of {1,…,n} into nonempty sets A and B.  The idea is that Φ should be large, if and only if it’s not possible to partition the variables into two sets A and B, in such a way that not much information flows from A to B or vice versa when f(x) is computed.

However, no sooner do we propose this than we notice a technical problem.  What if A is much larger than B, or vice versa?  As an extreme case, what if A={1,…,n-1} and B={n}?  In that case, we’ll have Φ(A,B)≤2log2|S|, but only for the boring reason that there’s hardly any entropy in B as a whole, to either influence A or be influenced by it.  For this reason, Tononi proposes a fix where we normalize each Φ(A,B) by dividing it by min{|A|,|B|}.  He then defines the integrated information Φ to be Φ(A,B), for whichever partition (A,B) minimizes the ratio Φ(A,B) / min{|A|,|B|}.  (Unless I missed it, Tononi never specifies what we should do if there are multiple (A,B)’s that all achieve the same minimum of Φ(A,B) / min{|A|,|B|}.  I’ll return to that point later, along with other idiosyncrasies of the normalization procedure.)

Tononi gives some simple examples of the computation of Φ, showing that it is indeed larger for systems that are more “richly interconnected” in an intuitive sense.  He speculates, plausibly, that Φ is quite large for (some reasonable model of) the interconnection network of the human brain—and probably larger for the brain than for typical electronic devices (which tend to be highly modular in design, thereby decreasing their Φ), or, let’s say, than for other organs like the pancreas.  Ambitiously, he even speculates at length about how a large value of Φ might be connected to the phenomenology of consciousness.

To be sure, empirical work in integrated information theory has been hampered by three difficulties.  The first difficulty is that we don’t know the detailed interconnection network of the human brain.  The second difficulty is that it’s not even clear what we should define that network to be: for example, as a crude first attempt, should we assign a Boolean variable to each neuron, which equals 1 if the neuron is currently firing and 0 if it’s not firing, and let f be the function that updates those variables over a timescale of, say, a millisecond?  What other variables do we need—firing rates, internal states of the neurons, neurotransmitter levels?  Is choosing many of these variables uniformly at random (for the purpose of calculating Φ) really a reasonable way to “randomize” the variables, and if not, what other prescription should we use?

The third and final difficulty is that, even if we knew exactly what we meant by “the f and x corresponding to the human brain,” and even if we had complete knowledge of that f and x, computing Φ(f,x) could still be computationally intractable.  For recall that the definition of Φ involved minimizing a quantity over all the exponentially-many possible bipartitions of {1,…,n}.  While it’s not directly relevant to my arguments in this post, I leave it as a challenge for interested readers to pin down the computational complexity of approximating Φ to some reasonable precision, assuming that f is specified by a polynomial-size Boolean circuit, or alternatively, by an NC0 function (i.e., a function each of whose outputs depends on only a constant number of the inputs).  (Presumably Φ will be #P-hard to calculate exactly, but only because calculating entropy exactly is a #P-hard problem—that’s not interesting.)

I conjecture that approximating Φ is an NP-hard problem, even for restricted families of f’s like NC0 circuits—which invites the amusing thought that God, or Nature, would need to solve an NP-hard problem just to decide whether or not to imbue a given physical system with consciousness!  (Alas, if you wanted to exploit this as a practical approach for solving NP-complete problems such as 3SAT, you’d need to do a rather drastic experiment on your own brain—an experiment whose result would be to render you unconscious if your 3SAT instance was satisfiable, or conscious if it was unsatisfiable!  In neither case would you be able to communicate the outcome of the experiment to anyone else, nor would you have any recollection of the outcome after the experiment was finished.)  In the other direction, it would also be interesting to upper-bound the complexity of approximating Φ.  Because of the need to estimate the entropies of distributions (even given a bipartition (A,B)), I don’t know that this problem is in NP—the best I can observe is that it’s in AM.

In any case, my own reason for rejecting IIT has nothing to do with any of the “merely practical” issues above: neither the difficulty of defining f and x, nor the difficulty of learning them, nor the difficulty of calculating Φ(f,x).  My reason is much more basic, striking directly at the hypothesized link between “integrated information” and consciousness.  Specifically, I claim the following:

Yes, it might be a decent rule of thumb that, if you want to know which brain regions (for example) are associated with consciousness, you should start by looking for regions with lots of information integration.  And yes, it’s even possible, for all I know, that having a large Φ-value is one necessary condition among many for a physical system to be conscious.  However, having a large Φ-value is certainly not a sufficient condition for consciousness, or even for the appearance of consciousness.  As a consequence, Φ can’t possibly capture the essence of what makes a physical system conscious, or even of what makes a system look conscious to external observers.

The demonstration of this claim is embarrassingly simple.  Let S=Fp, where p is some prime sufficiently larger than n, and let V be an n×n Vandermonde matrix over Fp—that is, a matrix whose (i,j) entry equals ij-1 (mod p).  Then let f:Sn→Sn be the update function defined by f(x)=Vx.  Now, for p large enough, the Vandermonde matrix is well-known to have the property that every submatrix is full-rank (i.e., “every submatrix preserves all the information that it’s possible to preserve about the part of x that it acts on”).  And this implies that, regardless of which bipartition (A,B) of {1,…,n} we choose, we’ll get

EI(A→B) = EI(B→A) = min{|A|,|B|} log2p,

and hence

Φ(A,B) = EI(A→B) + EI(B→A) = 2 min{|A|,|B|} log2p,

or after normalizing,

Φ(A,B) / min{|A|,|B|} = 2 log2p.

Or in words: the normalized information integration has the same value—namely, the maximum value!—for every possible bipartition.  Now, I’d like to proceed from here to a determination of Φ itself, but I’m prevented from doing so by the ambiguity in the definition of Φ that I noted earlier.  Namely, since every bipartition (A,B) minimizes the normalized value Φ(A,B) / min{|A|,|B|}, in theory I ought to be able to pick any of them for the purpose of calculating Φ.  But the unnormalized value Φ(A,B), which gives the final Φ, can vary greatly, across bipartitions: from 2 log2p (if min{|A|,|B|}=1) all the way up to n log2p (if min{|A|,|B|}=n/2).  So at this point, Φ is simply undefined.

On the other hand, I can solve this problem, and make Φ well-defined, by an ironic little hack.  The hack is to replace the Vandermonde matrix V by an n×n matrix W, which consists of the first n/2 rows of the Vandermonde matrix each repeated twice (assume for simplicity that n is a multiple of 4).  As before, we let f(x)=Wx.  Then if we set A={1,…,n/2} and B={n/2+1,…,n}, we can achieve

EI(A→B) = EI(B→A) = (n/4) log2p,

Φ(A,B) = EI(A→B) + EI(B→A) = (n/2) log2p,

and hence

Φ(A,B) / min{|A|,|B|} = log2p.

In this case, I claim that the above is the unique bipartition that minimizes the normalized integrated information Φ(A,B) / min{|A|,|B|}, up to trivial reorderings of the rows.  To prove this claim: if |A|=|B|=n/2, then clearly we minimize Φ(A,B) by maximizing the number of repeated rows in A and the number of repeated rows in B, exactly as we did above.  Thus, assume |A|≤|B| (the case |B|≤|A| is analogous).  Then clearly

EI(B→A) ≥ |A|/2,

while

EI(A→B) ≥ min{|A|, |B|/2}.

So if we let |A|=cn and |B|=(1-c)n for some c∈(0,1/2], then

Φ(A,B) ≥ [c/2 + min{c, (1-c)/2}] n,

and

Φ(A,B) / min{|A|,|B|} = Φ(A,B) / |A| = 1/2 + min{1, 1/(2c) – 1/2}.

But the above expression is uniquely minimized when c=1/2.  Hence the normalized integrated information is minimized essentially uniquely by setting A={1,…,n/2} and B={n/2+1,…,n}, and we get

Φ = Φ(A,B) = (n/2) log2p,

which is quite a large value (only a factor of 2 less than the trivial upper bound of n log2p).

Now, why did I call the switch from V to W an “ironic little hack”?  Because, in order to ensure a large value of Φ, I decreased—by a factor of 2, in fact—the amount of “information integration” that was intuitively happening in my system!  I did that in order to decrease the normalized value Φ(A,B) / min{|A|,|B|} for the particular bipartition (A,B) that I cared about, thereby ensuring that that (A,B) would be chosen over all the other bipartitions, thereby increasing the final, unnormalized value Φ(A,B) that Tononi’s prescription tells me to return.  I hope I’m not alone in fearing that this illustrates a disturbing non-robustness in the definition of Φ.

But let’s leave that issue aside; maybe it can be ameliorated by fiddling with the definition.  The broader point is this: I’ve shown that my system—the system that simply applies the matrix W to an input vector x—has an enormous amount of integrated information Φ.  Indeed, this system’s Φ equals half of its entire information content.  So for example, if n were 1014 or so—something that wouldn’t be hard to arrange with existing computers—then this system’s Φ would exceed any plausible upper bound on the integrated information content of the human brain.

And yet this Vandermonde system doesn’t even come close to doing anything that we’d want to call intelligent, let alone conscious!  When you apply the Vandermonde matrix to a vector, all you’re really doing is mapping the list of coefficients of a degree-(n-1) polynomial over Fp, to the values of the polynomial on the n points 0,1,…,n-1.  Now, evaluating a polynomial on a set of points turns out to be an excellent way to achieve “integrated information,” with every subset of outputs as correlated with every subset of inputs as it could possibly be.  In fact, that’s precisely why polynomials are used so heavily in error-correcting codes, such as the Reed-Solomon code, employed (among many other places) in CD’s and DVD’s.  But that doesn’t imply that every time you start up your DVD player you’re lighting the fire of consciousness.  It doesn’t even hint at such a thing.  All it tells us is that you can have integrated information without consciousness (or even intelligence)—just like you can have computation without consciousness, and unpredictability without consciousness, and electricity without consciousness.

It might be objected that, in defining my “Vandermonde system,” I was too abstract and mathematical.  I said that the system maps the input vector x to the output vector Wx, but I didn’t say anything about how it did so.  To perform a computation—even a computation as simple as a matrix-vector multiply—won’t we need a physical network of wires, logic gates, and so forth?  And in any realistic such network, won’t each logic gate be directly connected to at most a few other gates, rather than to billions of them?  And if we define the integrated information Φ, not directly in terms of the inputs and outputs of the function f(x)=Wx, but in terms of all the actual logic gates involved in computing f, isn’t it possible or even likely that Φ will go back down?

This is a good objection, but I don’t think it can rescue IIT.  For we can achieve the same qualitative effect that I illustrated with the Vandermonde matrix—the same “global information integration,” in which every large set of outputs depends heavily on every large set of inputs—even using much “sparser” computations, ones where each individual output depends on only a few of the inputs.  This is precisely the idea behind low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, which have had a major impact on coding theory over the past two decades.  Of course, one would need to muck around a bit to construct a physical system based on LDPC codes whose integrated information Φ was provably large, and for which there were no wildly-unbalanced bipartitions that achieved lower Φ(A,B)/min{|A|,|B|} values than the balanced bipartitions one cared about.  But I feel safe in asserting that this could be done, similarly to how I did it with the Vandermonde matrix.

More generally, we can achieve pretty good information integration by hooking together logic gates according to any bipartite expander graph: that is, any graph with n vertices on each side, such that every k vertices on the left side are connected to at least min{(1+ε)k,n} vertices on the right side, for some constant ε>0.  And it’s well-known how to create expander graphs whose degree (i.e., the number of edges incident to each vertex, or the number of wires coming out of each logic gate) is a constant, such as 3.  One can do so either by plunking down edges at random, or (less trivially) by explicit constructions from algebra or combinatorics.  And as indicated in the title of this post, I feel 100% confident in saying that the so-constructed expander graphs are not conscious!  The brain might be an expander, but not every expander is a brain.

Before winding down this post, I can’t resist telling you that the concept of integrated information (though it wasn’t called that) played an interesting role in computational complexity in the 1970s.  As I understand the history, Leslie Valiant conjectured that Boolean functions f:{0,1}n→{0,1}n with a high degree of “information integration” (such as discrete analogues of the Fourier transform) might be good candidates for proving circuit lower bounds, which in turn might be baby steps toward P≠NP.  More strongly, Valiant conjectured that the property of information integration, all by itself, implied that such functions had to be at least somewhat computationally complex—i.e., that they couldn’t be computed by circuits of size O(n), or even required circuits of size Ω(n log n).  Alas, that hope was refuted by Valiant’s later discovery of linear-size superconcentrators.  Just as information integration doesn’t suffice for intelligence or consciousness, so Valiant learned that information integration doesn’t suffice for circuit lower bounds either.

As humans, we seem to have the intuition that global integration of information is such a powerful property that no “simple” or “mundane” computational process could possibly achieve it.  But our intuition is wrong.  If it were right, then we wouldn’t have linear-size superconcentrators or LDPC codes.

I should mention that I had the privilege of briefly speaking with Giulio Tononi (as well as his collaborator, Christof Koch) this winter at an FQXi conference in Puerto Rico.  At that time, I challenged Tononi with a much cruder, handwavier version of some of the same points that I made above.  Tononi’s response, as best as I can reconstruct it, was that it’s wrong to approach IIT like a mathematician; instead one needs to start “from the inside,” with the phenomenology of consciousness, and only then try to build general theories that can be tested against counterexamples.  This response perplexed me: of course you can start from phenomenology, or from anything else you like, when constructing your theory of consciousness.  However, once your theory has been constructed, surely it’s then fair game for others to try to refute it with counterexamples?  And surely the theory should be judged, like anything else in science or philosophy, by how well it withstands such attacks?

But let me end on a positive note.  In my opinion, the fact that Integrated Information Theory is wrong—demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core—puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed.  Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness.

[Endnote: See also this related post, by the philosopher Eric Schwetzgebel: Why Tononi Should Think That the United States Is Conscious.  While the discussion is much more informal, and the proposed counterexample more debatable, the basic objection to IIT is the same.]

Update (5/22): Here are a few clarifications of this post that might be helpful.

(1) The stuff about zombies and the Hard Problem was simply meant as motivation and background for what I called the “Pretty-Hard Problem of Consciousness”—the problem that I take IIT to be addressing.  You can disagree with the zombie stuff without it having any effect on my arguments about IIT.

(2) I wasn’t arguing in this post that dualism is true, or that consciousness is irreducibly mysterious, or that there could never be any convincing theory that told us how much consciousness was present in a physical system.  All I was arguing was that, at any rate, IIT is not such a theory.

(3) Yes, it’s true that my demonstration of IIT’s falsehood assumes—as an axiom, if you like—that while we might not know exactly what we mean by “consciousness,” at any rate we’re talking about something that humans have to a greater extent than DVD players.  If you reject that axiom, then I’d simply want to define a new word for a certain quality that non-anesthetized humans seem to have and that DVD players seem not to, and clarify that that other quality is the one I’m interested in.

(4) For my counterexample, the reason I chose the Vandermonde matrix is not merely that it’s invertible, but that all of its submatrices are full-rank.  This is the property that’s relevant for producing a large value of the integrated information Φ; by contrast, note that the identity matrix is invertible, but produces a system with Φ=0.  (As another note, if we work over a large enough field, then a random matrix will have this same property with high probability—but I wanted an explicit example, and while the Vandermonde is far from the only one, it’s one of the simplest.)

(5) The n×n Vandermonde matrix only does what I want if we work over (say) a prime field Fp with p>>n elements.  Thus, it’s natural to wonder whether similar examples exist where the basic system variables are bits, rather than elements of Fp.  The answer is yes. One way to get such examples is using the low-density parity check codes that I mention in the post.  Another common way to get Boolean examples, and which is also used in practice in error-correcting codes, is to start with the Vandermonde matrix (a.k.a. the Reed-Solomon code), and then combine it with an additional component that encodes the elements of Fp as strings of bits in some way.  Of course, you then need to check that doing this doesn’t harm the properties of the original Vandermonde matrix that you cared about (e.g., the “information integration”) too much, which causes some additional complication.

(6) Finally, it might be objected that my counterexamples ignored the issue of dynamics and “feedback loops”: they all consisted of unidirectional processes, which map inputs to outputs and then halt.  However, this can be fixed by the simple expedient of iterating the process over and over!  I.e., first map x to Wx, then map Wx to W2x, and so on.  The integrated information should then be the same as in the unidirectional case.

Update (5/24): See a very interesting comment by David Chalmers.

### The NEW Ten Most Annoying Questions in Quantum Computing

Tuesday, May 13th, 2014

Eight years ago, I put up a post entitled The Ten Most Annoying Questions in Quantum Computing.  One of the ten wasn’t a real question—it was simply a request for readers to submit questions—so let’s call it nine.  I’m delighted to say that, of the nine questions, six have by now been completely settled—most recently, my question about the parallel-repeated value of the CHSH game, which Andris Ambainis pointed out to me last week can be answered using a 2008 result of Barak et al. combined with a 2013 result of Dinur and Steurer.

To be clear, the demise of so many problems is exactly the outcome I wanted. In picking problems, my goal wasn’t to shock and awe with difficulty—as if to say “this is how smart I am, that whatever stumps me will also stump everyone else for decades.” Nor was it to showcase my bottomless profundity, by proffering questions so vague, multipartite, and open-ended that no matter what progress was made, I could always reply “ah, but you still haven’t addressed the real question!” Nor, finally, was my goal to list the biggest research directions for the entire field, the stuff everyone already knows about (“is there a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for graph isomorphism?”). My interest was exclusively in “little” questions, in weird puzzles that looked (at least at the time) like there was no deep obstruction to just killing them one by one, whichever way their answers turned out. What made them annoying was that they hadn’t succumbed already.

So, now that two-thirds of my problems have met the fate they deserved, at Andris’s suggestion I’m presenting a new list of Ten Most Annoying Questions in Quantum Computing—a list that starts with the three still-unanswered questions from the old list, and then adds seven more.

But we’ll get to that shortly. First, let’s review the six questions that have been answered.

CLOSED, NO-LONGER ANNOYING QUESTIONS IN QUANTUM COMPUTING

1. Given an n-qubit pure state, is there always a way to apply Hadamard gates to some subset of the qubits, so as to make all 2n computational basis states have nonzero amplitudes?  Positive answer by Ashley Montanaro and Dan Shepherd, posted to this blog in 2006.

3. Can any QMA(2) (QMA with two unentangled yes-provers) protocol be amplified to exponentially small error probability?  Positive answer by Aram Harrow and Ashley Montanaro, from a FOCS’2010 paper.

4. If a unitary operation U can be applied in polynomial time, then can some square root of U also be applied in polynomial time?  Positive answer by Lana Sheridan, Dmitri Maslov, and Michele Mosca, from a 2008 paper.

5. Suppose Alice and Bob are playing n parallel CHSH games, with no communication or entanglement. Is the probability that they’ll win all n games at most pn, for some p bounded below 0.853?

OK, let me relay what Andris Ambainis told me about this question, with Andris’s kind permission. First of all, we’ve known for a while that the optimal success probability is not the (3/4)n that Alice and Bob could trivially achieve by just playing all n games separately. I observed in 2006 that, by correlating their strategies between pairs of games in a clever way, Alice and Bob can win with probability (√10 / 4)n ~ 0.79n. And Barak et al. showed in 2008 that they can win with probability ((1+√5)/4)n ~ 0.81n. (Unfortunately, I don’t know the actual strategy that achieves the latter bound!  Barak et al. say they’ll describe it in the full version of their paper, but the full version hasn’t yet appeared.)

Anyway, Dinur-Steurer 2013 gave a general recipe to prove that the value of a repeated projection game is at most αn, where α is some constant that depends on the game in question. When Andris followed their recipe for the CHSH game, he obtained the result α=(1+√5)/4—thereby showing that Barak et al.’s strategy, whatever it is, is precisely optimal! Andris also observes that, for any two-prover game G, the Dinur-Steurer bound α(G) is always strictly less than the entangled value ω*(G), unless the classical and entangled values are the same for one copy of the game (i.e., unless ω(G)=ω*(G)). This implies that parallel repetition can never completely eliminate a quantum advantage.

6. Forget about an oracle relative to which BQP is not in PH (the Polynomial Hierarchy). Forget about an oracle relative to which BQP is not in AM (Arthur-Merlin). Is there an oracle relative to which BQP is not in SZK (Statistical Zero-Knowledge)?  Positive answer by me, posted to this blog in 2006.  See also my BQP vs. PH paper for a different proof.

9. Is there an n-qubit pure state that can be prepared by a circuit of size n3, and that can’t be distinguished from the maximally mixed state by any circuit of size n2?  A positive answer follows from this 2009 paper by Richard Low—thanks very much to Fernando Brandao for bringing that to my attention a few months ago.

OK, now on to:

THE NEW TEN MOST ANNOYING QUESTIONS IN QUANTUM COMPUTING

1. Can we get any upper bound whatsoever on the complexity class QMIP—i.e., quantum multi-prover interactive proofs with unlimited prior entanglement? (Since I asked this question in 2006, Ito and Vidick achieved the breakthrough lower bound NEXP⊆QMIP, but there’s been basically no progress on the upper bound side.)

2. Given any n-qubit unitary operation U, does there exist an oracle relative to which U can be (approximately) applied in polynomial time? (Since 2006, my interest in this question has only increased. See this paper by me and Greg Kuperberg for background and related results.)

3. How many mutually unbiased bases are there in non-prime-power dimensions?

4. Since Chris Fuchs was so thrilled by my including one of his favorite questions on my earlier list (question #3 above), let me add another of his favorites: do SIC-POVMs exist in arbitrary finite dimensions?

5. Is there a Boolean function f:{0,1}n→{0,1} whose bounded-error quantum query complexity is strictly greater than n/2?  (Thanks to Shelby Kimmel for this question!  Note that this paper by van Dam shows that the bounded-error quantum query complexity never exceeds n/2+O(√n), while this paper by Ambainis et al. shows that it’s at least n/2-O(√n) for almost all Boolean functions f.)

6. Is there a “universal disentangler”: that is, a superoperator S that takes nO(1) qubits as input; that produces a 2n-qubit bipartite state (with n qubits on each side) as output; whose output S(ρ) is always close in variation distance to a separable state; and that given an appropriate input state, can produce as output an approximation to any desired separable state?  (See here for background about this problem, originally posed by John Watrous. Note that if such an S existed and were computationally efficient, it would imply QMA=QMA(2).)

7. Suppose we have explicit descriptions of n two-outcome POVM measurements—say, as d×d Hermitian matrices E1,…,En—and are also given k=(log(nd))O(1) copies of an unknown quantum state ρ in d dimensions.  Is there a way to measure the copies so as to estimate the n expectation values Tr(E1ρ),…,Tr(Enρ), each to constant additive error?  (A forthcoming paper of mine on private-key quantum money will contain some background and related results.)

8. Is there a collection of 1- and 2-qubit gates that generates a group of unitary matrices that is (a) not universal for quantum computation, (b) not just conjugate to permuted diagonal matrices or one-qubit gates plus swaps, and (c) not conjugate to a subgroup of the Clifford group?

9. Given a partial Boolean function f:S→{0,1} with S⊆{0,1}n, is the bounded-error quantum query complexity of f always polynomially related to the smallest degree of any polynomial p:{0,1}n→R such that (a) p(x)∈[0,1] for all x∈{0,1}n, and (b) |p(x)-f(x)|≤1/3 for all x∈S?

10. Is there a quantum finite automaton that reads in an infinite sequence of i.i.d. coin flips, and whose limiting probability of being found in an “accept” state is at least 2/3 if the coin is fair and at most 1/3 if the coin is unfair?  (See this paper by me and Andy Drucker for background and related results.)

### The Quest for Randomness

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014

So, I’ve written an article of that title for the wonderful American Scientist magazine—or rather, Part I of such an article.  This part explains the basics of Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic information theory: how, under reasonable assumptions, these ideas can be used in principle to “certify” that a string of numbers was really produced randomly—something that one might’ve imagined impossible a priori.  Unfortunately, the article also explains why this fact is of limited use in practice: because Kolmogorov complexity is uncomputable!  Readers who already know this material won’t find much that’s new here, but I hope those who don’t will enjoy the piece.

Part II, to appear in the next issue, will be all about quantum entanglement and Bell’s Theorem, and their very recent use in striking protocols for generating so-called “Einstein-certified random numbers”—something of much more immediate practical interest.

Thanks so much to Fenella Saunders of American Scientist for commissioning these articles, and my apologies to her and any interested readers for the 4.5 years (!) it took me to get off my rear end (or rather, onto it) to write these things.

Update (4/28): Kate Becker of NOVA has published an article about “whether information is fundamental to reality,” which includes some quotes from me. Enjoy!

### Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

Friday, April 11th, 2014

So I’ve written an article about the above question for PBS’s website—a sort of tl;dr version of my 2005 survey paper NP-Complete Problems and Physical Reality, but updated with new material about the simulation of quantum field theories and about AdS/CFT.  Go over there, read the article (it’s free), then come back here to talk about it if you like.  Thanks so much to Kate Becker for commissioning the article.

In other news, there’s a profile of me at MIT News (called “The Complexonaut”) that some people might find amusing.

Oh, and anyone who thinks the main reason to care about quantum computing is that, if our civilization ever manages to surmount the profound scientific and technological obstacles to building a scalable quantum computer, then that little padlock icon on your web browser would no longer represent ironclad security?  Ha ha.  Yeah, it turns out that, besides factoring integers, you can also break OpenSSL by (for example) exploiting a memory bug in C.  The main reason to care about quantum computing is, and has always been, science.

### The Scientific Case for P≠NP

Friday, March 7th, 2014

Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of the so-called experts,” something that’s no more likely to be true than false.  The doubters can even point to at least one accomplished complexity theorist, Dick Lipton, who publicly advocates agnosticism about whether P=NP.

Of course, not all the doubters reach their doubts the same way.  For Lipton, the thinking is probably something like: as scientists, we should be rigorously open-minded, and constantly question even the most fundamental hypotheses of our field.  For the outsiders, the thinking is more like: computer scientists are just not very smart—certainly not as smart as real scientists—so the fact that they consider something a “fundamental hypothesis” provides no information of value.

Consider, for example, this comment of Ignacio Mosqueira:

If there is no proof that means that there is no reason a-priori to prefer your arguments over those [of] Lubos. Expertise is not enough.  And the fact that Lubos is difficult to deal with doesn’t change that.

In my response, I wondered how broadly Ignacio would apply the principle “if there’s no proof, then there’s no reason to prefer any argument over any other one.”  For example, would he agree with the guy interviewed on Jon Stewart who earnestly explained that, since there’s no proof that turning on the LHC will destroy the world, but also no proof that it won’t destroy the world, the only rational inference is that there’s a 50% chance it will destroy the world?  (John Oliver’s deadpan response was classic: “I’m … not sure that’s how probability works…”)

In a lengthy reply, Luboš bites this bullet with relish and mustard.  In physics, he agrees, or even in “continuous mathematics that is more physics-wise,” it’s possible to have justified beliefs even without proof.  For example, he admits to a 99.9% probability that the Riemann hypothesis is true.  But, he goes on, “partial evidence in discrete mathematics just cannot exist.”  Discrete math and computer science, you see, are so arbitrary, manmade, and haphazard that every question is independent of every other; no amount of experience can give anyone any idea which way the next question will go.

No, I’m not kidding.  That’s his argument.

I couldn’t help wondering: what about number theory?  Aren’t the positive integers a “discrete” structure?  And isn’t the Riemann Hypothesis fundamentally about the distribution of primes?  Or does the Riemann Hypothesis get counted as an “honorary physics-wise continuous problem” because it can also be stated analytically?  But then what about Goldbach’s Conjecture?  Is Luboš 50/50 on that one too?  Better yet, what about continuous, analytic problems that are closely related to P vs. NP?  For example, Valiant’s Conjecture says you can’t linearly embed the permanent of an n×n matrix as the determinant of an m×m matrix, unless m≥exp(n).  Mulmuley and others have connected this “continuous cousin” of P≠NP to issues in algebraic geometry, representation theory, and even quantum groups and Langlands duality.  So, does that make it kosher?  The more I thought about the proposed distinction, the less sense it made to me.

But enough of this.  In the rest of this post, I want to explain why the odds that you should assign to P≠NP are more like 99% than they are like 50%.  This post supersedes my 2006 post on the same topic, which I hereby retire.  While that post was mostly OK as far as it went, I now feel like I can do a much better job articulating the central point.  (And also, I made the serious mistake in 2006 of striving for literary eloquence and tongue-in-cheek humor.  That works great for readers who already know the issues inside-and-out, and just want to be amused.  Alas, it doesn’t work so well for readers who don’t know the issues, are extremely literal-minded, and just want ammunition to prove their starting assumption that I’m a doofus who doesn’t understand the basics of his own field.)

So, OK, why should you believe P≠NP?  Here’s why:

Because, like any other successful scientific hypothesis, the P≠NP hypothesis has passed severe tests that it had no good reason to pass were it false.

What kind of tests am I talking about?

By now, tens of thousands of problems have been proved to be NP-complete.  They range in character from theorem proving to graph coloring to airline scheduling to bin packing to protein folding to auction pricing to VLSI design to minimizing soap films to winning at Super Mario Bros.  Meanwhile, another cluster of tens of thousands of problems has been proved to lie in P (or BPP).  Those range from primality to matching to linear and semidefinite programming to edit distance to polynomial factoring to hundreds of approximation tasks.  Like the NP-complete problems, many of the P and BPP problems are also related to each other by a rich network of reductions.  (For example, countless other problems are in P “because” linear and semidefinite programming are.)

So, if we were to draw a map of the complexity class NP  according to current knowledge, what would it look like?  There’d be a huge, growing component of NP-complete problems, all connected to each other by an intricate network of reductions.  There’d be a second huge component of P problems, many of them again connected by reductions.  Then, much like with the map of the continental US, there’d be a sparser population in the middle: stuff like factoring, graph isomorphism, and Unique Games that for various reasons has thus far resisted assimilation onto either of the coasts.

Of course, to prove P=NP, it would suffice to find a single link—that is, a single polynomial-time equivalence—between any of the tens of thousands of problems on the P coast, and any of the tens of thousands on the NP-complete one.  In half a century, this hasn’t happened: even as they’ve both ballooned exponentially, the two giant regions have remained defiantly separate from each other.  But that’s not even the main point.  The main point is that, as people explore these two regions, again and again there are “close calls”: places where, if a single parameter had worked out differently, the two regions would have come together in a cataclysmic collision.  Yet every single time, it’s just a fake-out.  Again and again the two regions “touch,” and their border even traces out weird and jagged shapes.  But even in those border zones, not a single problem ever crosses from one region to the other.  It’s as if they’re kept on their respective sides by an invisible electric fence.

As an example, consider the Set Cover problem: i.e., the problem, given a collection of subsets S1,…,Sm⊆{1,…,n}, of finding as few subsets as possible whose union equals the whole set.  Chvatal showed in 1979 that a greedy algorithm can produce, in polynomial time, a collection of sets whose size is at most ln(n) times larger than the optimum size.  This raises an obvious question: can you do better?  What about 0.9ln(n)?  Alas, building on a long sequence of prior works in PCP theory, it was recently shown that, if you could find a covering set at most (1-ε)ln(n) times larger than the optimum one, then you’d be solving an NP-complete problem, and P would equal NP.  Notice that, conversely, if the hardness result worked for ln(n) or anything above, then we’d also get P=NP.  So, why do the algorithm and the hardness result “happen to meet” at exactly ln(n), with neither one venturing the tiniest bit beyond?  Well, we might say, ln(n) is where the invisible electric fence is for this problem.

Want another example?  OK then, consider the “Boolean Max-k-CSP” problem: that is, the problem of setting n bits so as to satisfy the maximum number of constraints, where each constraint can involve an arbitrary Boolean function on any k of the bits.  The best known approximation algorithm, based on semidefinite programming, is guaranteed to satisfy at least a 2k/2k fraction of the constraints.  Can you guess where this is going?  Recently, Siu On Chan showed that it’s NP-hard to satisfy even slightly more than a 2k/2k fraction of constraints: if you can, then P=NP.  In this case the invisible electric fence sends off its shocks at 2k/2k.

I could multiply such examples endlessly—or at least, Dana (my source for such matters) could do so.  But there are also dozens of “weird coincidences” that involve running times rather than approximation ratios; and that strongly suggest, not only that P≠NP, but that problems like 3SAT should require cn time for some constant c.  For a recent example—not even a particularly important one, but one that’s fresh in my memory—consider this paper by myself, Dana, and Russell Impagliazzo.  A first thing we do in that paper is to give an approximation algorithm for a family of two-prover games called “free games.”  Our algorithm runs in quasipolynomial time:  specifically, nO(log(n)).  A second thing we do is show how to reduce the NP-complete 3SAT problem to free games of size ~2O(√n).

Composing those two results, you get an algorithm for 3SAT whose overall running time is roughly

$$2^{O( \sqrt{n} \log 2^{\sqrt{n}}) } = 2^{O(n)}.$$

Of course, this doesn’t improve on the trivial “try all possible solutions” algorithm.  But notice that, if our approximation algorithm for free games had been slightly faster—say, nO(log log(n))—then we could’ve used it to solve 3SAT in $$2^{O(\sqrt{n} \log n)}$$ time.  Conversely, if our reduction from 3SAT had produced free games of size (say) $$2^{O(n^{1/3})}$$ rather than 2O(√n), then we could’ve used that to solve 3SAT in $$2^{O(n^{2/3})}$$ time.

I should stress that these two results have completely different proofs: the approximation algorithm for free games “doesn’t know or care” about the existence of the reduction, nor does the reduction know or care about the algorithm.  Yet somehow, their respective parameters “conspire” so that 3SAT still needs cn time.  And you see the same sort of thing over and over, no matter which problem domain you’re interested in.  These ubiquitous “coincidences” would be immediately explained if 3SAT actually did require cn time—i.e., if it had a “hard core” for which brute-force search was unavoidable, no matter which way you sliced things up.  If that’s not true—i.e., if 3SAT has a subexponential algorithm—then we’re left with unexplained “spooky action at a distance.”  How do the algorithms and the reductions manage to coordinate with each other, every single time, to avoid spilling the subexponential secret?

Notice that, contrary to Luboš’s loud claims, there’s no “symmetry” between P=NP and P≠NP in these arguments.  Lower bound proofs are much harder to come across than either algorithms or reductions, and there’s not really a mystery about why: it’s hard to prove a negative!  (Especially when you’re up against known mathematical barriers, including relativization, algebrization, and natural proofs.)  In other words, even under the assumption that lower bound proofs exist, we now understand a lot about why the existing mathematical tools can’t deliver them, or can only do so for much easier problems.  Nor can I think of any example of a “spooky numerical coincidence” between two unrelated-seeming results, which would’ve yielded a proof of P≠NP had some parameters worked out differently.  P=NP and P≠NP can look like “symmetric” possibilities only if your symmetry is unbroken by knowledge.

Imagine a pond with small yellow frogs on one end, and large green frogs on the other.  After observing the frogs for decades, herpetologists conjecture that the populations represent two distinct species with different evolutionary histories, and are not interfertile.  Everyone realizes that to disprove this hypothesis, all it would take would be a single example of a green/yellow hybrid.  Since (for some reason) the herpetologists really care about this question, they undertake a huge program of breeding experiments, putting thousands of yellow female frogs next to green male frogs (and vice versa) during mating season, with candlelight, soft music, etc.  Nothing.

As this green vs. yellow frog conundrum grows in fame, other communities start investigating it as well: geneticists, ecologists, amateur nature-lovers, commercial animal breeders, ambitious teenagers on the science-fair circuit, and even some extralusionary physicists hoping to show up their dimwitted friends in biology.  These other communities try out hundreds of exotic breeding strategies that the herpetologists hadn’t considered, and contribute many useful insights.  They also manage to breed a larger, greener, but still yellow frog—something that, while it’s not a “true” hybrid, does have important practical applications for the frog-leg industry.  But in the end, no one has any success getting green and yellow frogs to mate.

Then one day, someone exclaims: “aha!  I just found a huge, previously-unexplored part of the pond where green and yellow frogs live together!  And what’s more, in this part, the small yellow frogs are bigger and greener than normal, and the large green frogs are smaller and yellower!”

This is exciting: the previously-sharp boundary separating green from yellow has been blurred!  Maybe the chasm can be crossed after all!

Alas, further investigation reveals that, even in the new part of the pond, the two frog populations still stay completely separate.  The smaller, yellower frogs there will mate with other small yellow frogs (even from faraway parts of the pond that they’d never ordinarily visit), but never, ever with the larger, greener frogs even from their own part.  And vice versa.  The result?  A discovery that could have falsified the original hypothesis has instead strengthened it—and precisely because it could’ve falsified it but didn’t.

Now imagine the above story repeated a few dozen more times—with more parts of the pond, a neighboring pond, sexually-precocious tadpoles, etc.  Oh, and I forgot to say this before, but imagine that doing a DNA analysis, to prove once and for all that the green and yellow frogs had separate lineages, is extraordinarily difficult.  But the geneticists know why it’s so difficult, and the reasons have more to do with the limits of their sequencing machines and with certain peculiarities of frog DNA, than with anything about these specific frogs.  In fact, the geneticists did get the sequencing machines to work for the easier cases of turtles and snakes—and in those cases, their results usually dovetailed well with earlier guesses based on behavior.  So for example, where reddish turtles and bluish turtles had never been observed interbreeding, the reason really did turn out to be that they came from separate species.  There were some surprises, of course, but nothing even remotely as shocking as seeing the green and yellow frogs suddenly getting it on.

Now, even after all this, someone could saunter over to the pond and say: “ha, what a bunch of morons!  I’ve never even seen a frog or heard one croak, but I know that you haven’t proved anything!  For all you know, the green and yellow frogs will start going at it tomorrow.  And don’t even tell me about ‘the weight of evidence,’ blah blah blah.  Biology is a scummy mud-discipline.  It has no ideas or principles; it’s just a random assortment of unrelated facts.  If the frogs started mating tomorrow, that would just be another brute, arbitrary fact, no more surprising or unsurprising than if they didn’t start mating tomorrow.  You jokers promote the ideology that green and yellow frogs are separate species, not because the evidence warrants it, but just because it’s a convenient way to cover up your own embarrassing failure to get them to mate.  I could probably breed them myself in ten minutes, but I have better things to do.”

At this, a few onlookers might nod appreciatively and say: “y’know, that guy might be an asshole, but let’s give him credit: he’s unafraid to speak truth to competence.”

Even among the herpetologists, a few might beat their breasts and announce: “Who’s to say he isn’t right?  I mean, what do we really know?  How do we know there even is a pond, or that these so-called ‘frogs’ aren’t secretly giraffes?  I, at least, have some small measure of wisdom, in that I know that I know nothing.”

What I want you to notice is how scientifically worthless all of these comments are.  If you wanted to do actual research on the frogs, then regardless of which sympathies you started with, you’d have no choice but to ignore the naysayers, and proceed as if the yellow and green frogs were different species.  Sure, you’d have in the back of your mind that they might be the same; you’d be ready to adjust your views if new evidence came in.  But for now, the theory that there’s just one species, divided into two subgroups that happen never to mate despite living in the same habitat, fails miserably at making contact with any of the facts that have been learned.  It leaves too much unexplained; in fact it explains nothing.

For all that, you might ask, don’t the naysayers occasionally turn out to be right?  Of course they do!  But if they were right more than occasionally, then science wouldn’t be possible.  We would still be in caves, beating our breasts and asking how we can know that frogs aren’t secretly giraffes.

So, that’s what I think about P and NP.  Do I expect this post to convince everyone?  No—but to tell you the truth, I don’t want it to.  I want it to convince most people, but I also want a few to continue speculating that P=NP.

Why, despite everything I’ve said, do I want maybe-P=NP-ism not to die out entirely?  Because alongside the P=NP carpers, I also often hear from a second group of carpers.  This second group says that P and NP are so obviously, self-evidently unequal that the quest to separate them with mathematical rigor is quixotic and absurd.  Theoretical computer scientists should quit wasting their time struggling to understand truths that don’t need to be understood, but only accepted, and do something useful for the world.  (A natural generalization of this view, I guess, is that all basic science should end.)  So, what I really want is for the two opposing groups of naysayers to keep each other in check, so that those who feel impelled to do so can get on with the fascinating quest to understand the ultimate limits of computation.

Update (March 8): At least eight readers have by now emailed me, or left comments, asking why I’m wasting so much time and energy arguing with Luboš Motl.  Isn’t it obvious that, ever since he stopped doing research around 2006 (if not earlier), this guy has completely lost his marbles?  That he’ll never, ever change his mind about anything?

Yes.  In fact, I’ve noticed repeatedly that, even when Luboš is wrong about a straightforward factual matter, he never really admits error: he just switches, without skipping a beat, to some other way to attack his interlocutor.  (To give a small example: watch how he reacts to being told that graph isomorphism is neither known nor believed to be NP-complete.  Caught making a freshman-level error about the field he’s attacking, he simply rants about how graph isomorphism is just as “representative” and “important” as NP-complete problems anyway, since no discrete math question is ever more or less “important” than any other; they’re all equally contrived and arbitrary.  At the Luboš casino, you lose even when you win!  The only thing you can do is stop playing and walk away.)

Anyway, my goal here was never to convince Luboš.  I was writing, not for him, but for my other readers: especially for those genuinely unfamiliar with these interesting issues, or intimidated by Luboš’s air of certainty.  I felt like I owed it to them to set out, clearly and forcefully, certain facts that all complexity theorists have encountered in their research, but that we hardly ever bother to articulate.  If you’ve never studied physics, then yes, it sounds crazy that there would be quadrillions of invisible neutrinos coursing through your body.  And if you’ve never studied computer science, it sounds crazy that there would be an “invisible electric fence,” again and again just barely separating what the state-of-the-art approximation algorithms can handle from what the state-of-the-art PCP tools can prove is NP-complete.  But there it is, and I wanted everyone else at least to see what the experts see, so that their personal judgments about the likelihood of P=NP could be informed by seeing it.

Luboš’s response to my post disappointed me (yes, really!).  I expected it to be nasty and unhinged, and so it was.  What I didn’t expect was that it would be so intellectually lightweight.  Confronted with the total untenability of his foot-stomping distinction between “continuous math” (where you can have justified beliefs without proof) and “discrete math” (where you can’t), and with exactly the sorts of “detailed, confirmed predictions” of the P≠NP hypothesis that he’d declared impossible, Luboš’s response was simply to repeat his original misconceptions, but louder.

And that brings me, I confess, to a second reason for my engagement with Luboš.  Several times, I’ve heard people express sentiments like:

Yes, of course Luboš is a raging jerk and a social retard.  But if you can just get past that, he’s so sharp and intellectually honest!  No matter how many people he needlessly offends, he always tells it like it is.

I want the nerd world to see—in as stark a situation as possible—that the above is not correct.  Luboš is wrong much of the time, and he’s intellectually dishonest.

At one point in his post, Luboš actually compares computer scientists who find P≠NP a plausible working hypothesis to his even greater nemesis: the “climate cataclysmic crackpots.”  (Strangely, he forgot to compare us to feminists, Communists, Muslim terrorists, or loop quantum gravity theorists.)  Even though the P versus NP and global warming issues might not seem closely linked, part of me is thrilled that Luboš has connected them as he has.  If, after seeing this ex-physicist’s “thought process” laid bare on the P versus NP problem—how his arrogance and incuriosity lead him to stake out a laughably-absurd position; how his vanity then causes him to double down after his errors are exposed—if, after seeing this, a single person is led to question Lubošian epistemology more generally, then my efforts will not have been in vain.

Anyway, now that I’ve finally unmasked Luboš—certainly to my own satisfaction, and I hope to that of most scientifically-literate readers—I’m done with this.  The physicist John Baez is rumored to have said: “It’s not easy to ignore Luboš, but it’s ALWAYS worth the effort.”  It took me eight years, but I finally see the multiple layers of profundity hidden in that snark.

And thus I make the following announcement:

For the next three years, I, Scott Aaronson, will not respond to anything Luboš says, nor will I allow him to comment on this blog.

In March 2017, I’ll reassess my Luboš policy.  Whether I relent will depend on a variety of factors—including whether Luboš has gotten the professional help he needs (from a winged pig, perhaps?) and changed his behavior; but also, how much my own quality of life has improved in the meantime.

Another Update (3/11): There’s some further thoughtful discussion of this post over on Reddit.

Another Update (3/13): Check out my MathOverflow question directly inspired by the comments on this post.

Yet Another Update (3/17): Dick Lipton and Ken Regan now have a response up to this post. My own response is coming soon in their comment section. For now, check out an excellent comment by Timothy Gowers, which begins “I firmly believe that P≠NP,” then plays devil’s-advocate by exploring the possibility that in this comment thread I called P being ‘severed in two,’ then finally returns to reasons for believing that P≠NP after all.