## Quantum computing news (98% Trump-free)

November 24th, 2016

(1) Apparently Microsoft has decided to make a major investment in building topological quantum computers, which will include hiring Charles Marcus and Matthias Troyer among others.  See here for their blog post, and here for the New York Times piece.  In the race to implement QC among the established corporate labs, Microsoft thus joins the Martinis group at Google, as well as the IBM group at T. J. Watson—though both Google and IBM are focused on superconducting qubits, rather than the more exotic nonabelian anyon approach that Microsoft has long favored and is now doubling down on.  I don’t really know more about this new initiative beyond what’s in the articles, but I know many of the people involved, they’re some of the most serious in the business, and Microsoft intensifying its commitment to QC can only be good for the field.  I wish the new effort every success, despite being personally agnostic between superconducting qubits, trapped ions, photonics, nonabelian anyons, and other QC hardware proposals—whichever one gets there first is fine with me!

(2) For me, though, perhaps the most exciting QC development of the last month was a new preprint by my longtime friend Dorit Aharonov and her colleague Yosi Atia, entitled Fast-Forwarding of Hamiltonians and Exponentially Precise Measurements.  In this work, Dorit and Yosi wield the clarifying sword of computational complexity at one of the most historically confusing issues in quantum mechanics: namely, the so-called “time-energy uncertainty principle” (TEUP).

The TEUP says that, just as position and momentum are conjugate in quantum mechanics, so too are energy and time—with greater precision in energy corresponding to lesser precision in time and vice versa.  The trouble is, it was never 100% clear what the TEUP even meant—after all, time isn’t even an observable in quantum mechanics, just an external parameter—and, to whatever extent the TEUP did have a definite meaning, it wasn’t clear that it was true.  Indeed, as Dorit and Yosi’s paper discusses in detail, in 1961 Dorit’s uncle Yakir Aharonov, together with David Bohm, gave a counterexample to a natural interpretation of the TEUP.  But, despite this and other counterexamples, the general feeling among physicists—who, after all, are physicists!—seems to have been that some corrected version of the TEUP should hold “in all reasonable circumstances.”

But, OK, what do we mean by a “reasonable circumstance”?  This is where Dorit and Yosi come in.   In the new work, they present a compelling case that the TEUP should really be formulated as a tradeoff between the precision of energy measurements and circuit complexity (that is, the minimum number of gates needed to implement the energy measurement)—and in that amended form, the TEUP holds for exactly those Hamiltonians H that can’t be “computationally fast-forwarded.”  In other words, it holds whenever applying the unitary transformation e-iHt requires close to t computation steps, when there’s no magical shortcut that lets you simulate t steps of time evolution with only (say) log(t) steps.  And, just as the physicists handwavingly thought, that should indeed hold for “generic” Hamiltonians H (assuming BQP≠PSPACE), although it’s possible to use Shor’s algorithm, for finding the order of an element in a multiplicative group, to devise a counterexample to it.

Anyway, there’s lots of other stuff in the paper, including a connection to the stuff Lenny Susskind and I have been doing about the “generic” growth of circuit complexity, in the CFT dual of an expanding wormhole (where we also needed to assume BQP≠PSPACE and closely related complexity separations, for much the same reasons).  Congratulations to Dorit and Yosi for once again illustrating the long reach of computational complexity in physics, and for giving me a reason to be happy this month!

(3) As many of you will have seen, my former MIT colleagues, Lior Eldar and Peter Shor, recently posted an arXiv preprint claiming a bombshell result: namely, a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve a variant of the Closest Vector Problem in lattices.  Their claimed algorithm wouldn’t yet break lattice-based cryptography, but if the approximation factors could be improved, it would be well on the way to doing so.  This has been one of the most tempting targets for quantum algorithms research for more than twenty years—ever since Shor’s “original” algorithm laid waste to RSA, Diffie-Hellman, elliptic-curve cryptography, and more in a world with scalable quantum computers, leaving lattice-based cryptography as one of the few public-key crypto proposals still standing.

Unfortunately, Lior tells me that Oded Regev has discovered a flaw in the algorithm, which he and Peter don’t currently know how to fix.  So for now, they’re withdrawing the paper (because of the Thanksgiving holiday, the withdrawal won’t take effect on the arXiv until Monday).  It’s still a worthy attempt on a great problem—here’s hoping that they or someone else manage to, as Lior put it to me, “make the algorithm great again.”

## A paper trail that’s never checked might as well not exist

November 23rd, 2016

Update and Action Item: Just since late this afternoon, the Jill Stein campaign has already raised more than $1 million toward requesting hand recounts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Their target is$6-7 million.  I just donated what I could; if you agree with this post, then please do the same.  It doesn’t matter at this point if you disagree with Stein, or even (like me) think she shouldn’t have run: the goal is just to get a recount to happen before the deadline expires.

Another Update (11/24): In an amazing demonstration of the power of online fundraising, the Stein campaign has already, in less than 24 hours, raised the \$2.5 million needed to fund a recount in Wisconsin.  Now they’re working on Pennsylvania and Michigan.  Amusing that Stein seems finally to have found a winning cause: Hillary!  (“Fighting for Hillary even when Hillary won’t fight for herself.”)  Again: please donate here.

Third Update (11/25):  The recount is on is Wisconsin!  The Stein campaign hasn’t yet filed in Pennsylvania or Michigan, but will do so next.  So, all the commenters who came here to explain to me that this was a scam, no judge would it allow it to go forward, etc.: please update your priors.  And next time, if you won’t listen to me, at least listen to Alex Halderman…

This will probably be my last election-related post.  After this (assuming, of course, that the effort I’m writing about fails…), I plan to encase myself in a bubble, stop reading news, and go back to thinking about quantum lower bounds, as if we still lived in a world where it made sense to do so.  But this is important.

As many of you have probably seen, several of the US’s top computer security experts, including my former MIT colleague Ron Rivest and my childhood friend Alex Halderman, have publicly urged that an audit of the US election take place.  But time is quickly running out.  If, for example, the Clinton campaign were to request a hand recount, the deadlines would be this Friday in Wisconsin, Monday in Pennsylvania, and next Wednesday in Michigan.  So far, alas, the Clinton campaign seems to have shown little interest, which would leave it to one of the third-party candidates to request a recount (they have the legal right too, if they can come up with the money for it).  In the meantime, I urge everyone to sign a petition demanding an audit.

For me, the key point is this: given the proven insecurity of electronic voting machines, an audit of paper ballots ought to be completely routine, even if there weren’t the slightest grounds for suspicion.  In this particular case, of course, we know for a fact (!!) that Russian intelligence was engaging in cyber-warfare to influence the US election.  We also know that Russia has both the will and the technological ability to tamper with foreign elections using vote-stealing malware—indeed, it nearly succeeded in doing so in Ukraine’s 2014 election.  Finally, we know that Trump, despite losing the popular vote, surprised just about everyone by outperforming his polls in three crucial swing states—and that within those states, Trump did systematically better in counties that relied on electronic voting machines than in counties that used scanners and paper ballots.

Nate Silver has tweeted that he sees no evidence of foul play, since the discrepancy disappears once you control for the education level of the counties (for more, see this FiveThirtyEight article).

But that’s the thing.  In a sane world, skeptics wouldn’t need to present statistical proof of foul play in order to trigger a hand count.  For if enemy actors know that, in practice, hand counts are never going to happen, then they’re free to be completely brazen in tampering with the childishly-insecure electronic voting machines themselves.  If no one ever looks at them, then the paper records might as well not exist.

Would anyone in the 1950s or 60s have believed that, a half-century hence, Russia actually would acquire the terrifying power over the US that the right-wing Cold Warriors once hyperventilated about—sometimes choosing to exercise that power, sometimes not—and that 2016’s conservatives would either shrug or welcome the development, while the only people who wanted to take reasonable precautions were a few rabble-rousing professors and activists?

Fate has decided that we should live in a branch of the wavefunction where the worst triumph by flaunting their terribleness and where nothing makes sense.  But however infinitesimal the chances anyone will listen, we should still insist that the sensible things be done—if nothing else, then simply as a way to maintain our own mental connection to the world of sense.

Happy Thanksgiving.

## Never, never, never normalize this

November 11th, 2016

It’s become depressingly clear the last few days that even many American liberals don’t understand the magnitude of what’s happened.  Maybe those well-meaning liberals simply have more faith than I do in our nation’s institutions, despite the recent overwhelming evidence to the contrary (if the institutions couldn’t stop a Trump presidency, then what can they stop?).  Maybe they think all Republicans are as bad as Trump, or even that Trump is preferable to a generic Republican.  Or maybe my liberal friends are so obsessed by the comparatively petty rivalries between the far left and the center left—between Sanders and Clinton, or between social-justice types and Silicon Valley nerds—that they’ve lost sight of the only part of this story that anyone will care about a hundred years from now: namely, the delivering of the United States into the hands of a vengeful lunatic and his sycophants.

I was sickened to read Hillary’s concession speech—a speech that can only possibly mean she never meant what she said before, about how “a man you can bait with a tweet must never be trusted with nuclear weapons”—and then to watch President Obama holding a lovey-dovey press conference with Trump in the White House.  President Obama is a wiser man than I am, and I’m sure he had excellent utilitarian reasons to do what he did (like trying to salvage parts of the Affordable Care Act).  But still, I couldn’t help but imagine the speech I would’ve given, had I been in Obama’s shoes:

Trump, and the movement he represents, never accepted me as a legitimate president, even though I won two elections by a much greater margin than he did.  Now, like the petulant child he is, he demands that we accept him as a legitimate president.  To which I say: very well.  I urge my supporters to obey the law, and to eschew violence.  But for God’s sake: protest this puny autocrat in the streets, refuse any cooperation with his administration, block his judicial appointments, and try every legal avenue to get him impeached.  Demonstrate to the rest of the world and to history that there’s a large part of the United States that remained loyal to the nation’s founding principles, and that never accepted this vindictive charlatan.  You can have the White House, Mr. Trump, but you will never have the sanction or support of the Union—only of the Confederacy.

Given the refusal of so many people I respect to say anything like the above, it came as a relief to read a brilliant New York Review of Books piece by Masha Gessen, a Russian journalist who I’d previously known for her fine biography of Grisha Perelman (the recluse who proved the Poincaré Conjecture), and who’s repeatedly risked her life to criticize Vladimir Putin.  Gessen takes Clinton and Obama to task for their (no doubt well-intentioned) appeasement of a monstrous thug.  She then clearly explains why the United States is now headed for the kind of society Russians are intimately familiar with, and she shares the following rules for surviving an autocracy:

1. Believe the autocrat.
2. Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
3. Institutions will not save you.
4. Be outraged.
5. Don’t make compromises.
6. Remember the future.

Her important essay is well worth reading in full.

In the comments of my last post, an international student posted a heartbreaking question:

As I said before, I have no doubt that many talented students will respond to America’s self-inflicted catastrophe by choosing to study in Canada, the EU, or elsewhere.  I wish they wouldn’t, but I don’t blame them.  At the same time, even in the darkest hour, human affairs are never completely exempt from the laws of supply and demand.  So for example, if Trump caused enough other foreign researchers to leave the US, then it’s possible that a spot at Harvard, Princeton, or MIT could become yours for the taking.

I can’t tell you what to do, but as you ponder your decision, please remember that slightly more than half of Americans—including the overwhelming majority of residents of the major cities and college towns—despise Trump, will always despise Trump, and will try to continue to build a society that upholds the values of the Enlightenment, one that welcomes people of every background.  Granted, the Union side of America has problems of its own, and I know some of those problems as well as anyone.  But at least it’s not the Confederacy, and it’s what you’d mostly be dealing with if you came here.

Finally, I wanted to share some Facebook postings about the election by my friend (and recent interviewer) Julia Galef.  In these posts, Julia sets out some of the same thoughts that I’ve had, but with an eloquence that I haven’t been able to muster.  It’s important to understand that these posts by Julia—whose day job is to run rationality seminars—are far and away the most emotional things I’ve ever seen her write, but they’re also less emotional than anything I could write at this time!

Naturally, my sharing of Julia’s posts shouldn’t be taken to imply that she agrees with everything I’ve said on this blog about the election, or conversely, that I agree with everything she says.  I simply wanted to give her an additional platform to speak for herself.

The rest of this post is Julia:

I’m seeing some well-intentioned posts insisting “See, this is proof we need to be listening to and empathizing with Trump supporters, not just calling them stupid.”

Generally I’m a fan of that kind of thing, but now… Jesus fucking Christ, we TRIED that. Did you not see how many journalists went to small towns and respectfully listened to people say stupid shit like “I can’t vote for Hillary because she’s the antichrist,” and then tried to figure out how that stupid shit was actually, maybe a reasonable argument about trade policy?

Sometimes the answer is not “People are astutely seeing things that I, inside my bubble, have missed.” Sometimes the answer is just “People are fucking morons whose brains are not built to see through bullshit.”

(To be clear, I think this applies to people in general, including Hillary voters. We just happen to have been a bit less moronic in this particular context.)

And fine, if you want to argue that it’s strategically *wise* for us to understand what makes Trump fans tick, so that we can prevent this from happening again — assuming we get the chance — then fine.

But if you keep insisting that we “just don’t understand” that Trump voters aren’t stupid, then I’m going to take a break from the blank look of horror I’ll be wearing all day, and flash you a look of withering incredulity. Maybe Trump voters aren’t stupid in other contexts, but this sure was a fucking stupid, destructive thing they did.

~~~~
EDIT: Predictably, some people are interpreting my point as: Trump supporters are stupid and/or evil, Clinton supporters are not.

That’s not my point. My point is that humans IN GENERAL are bad at reasoning and seeing through bullshit, which caused particularly bad consequences this time via Trump fans, who made a choice that (if the human brain were better at reasoning) they would have realized was net bad for their overall goals, which presumably include avoiding nuclear war.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I realized it’s not clear to many people exactly why I’m so upset about Trump winning, so let me elaborate.

What upsets me the most about Trump’s victory is not his policies (to the extent that he has coherent policy positions). It’s not even his racism or sexism, though those do upset me. It’s what his victory reveals about the fragility of our democracy.

Trump incites violence at rallies. He spreads lies and conspiracy theories (birtherism, rigged elections) that damage the long-term credibility of the political process, just for his own short-sighted gain. He’s ruined [EDIT: tried to ruin] journalists’ careers for criticizing him, and bragged about it. He’s talked explicitly about his intent to pursue “revenge” on people who crossed him, once he becomes president. He said he would try to jail Hillary. He clearly has little knowledge of, or respect for, the Constitution or international treaties.

And half of our country looked at all that, and either said “Awesome!” or simply shrugged.

Maybe you assume Congress or the courts won’t let Trump get away with anything undemocratic. But did you see the way the Republican leadership swallowed their objections to Trump once he became the nominee, in the name of party unity? Why should we expect them to stand up to him once he’s actually the most powerful man in the world, if they didn’t before (and see earlier points about his love of revenge)?

I really do hope the Trump presidency turns out, somehow, to be not as bad as it seems. But even if that’s the case… we’ve already learned that America cares so little about democratic norms and institutions that it’s happy to elect someone like Trump.

How can you NOT be worried and depressed by that?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OK, first off, this is a pretty sneering article for someone who’s condemning sneering.

Secondly… this is the kind of article I was responding to, in my angry post a couple of days ago.

(The point of that post got misinterpreted by a lot of people — which is understandable, because I was simultaneously trying to convey #1: a nuanced point AND #2: a lot of strong emotion at the same time. I still endorse both the point and the emotion, it’s just tricky to do both well at once. This post is an attempt to just focus on #1.)

What I was trying to say is that I think electing Trump was a very destructive and stupid thing to do. And that I reject the implication, from people like this columnist, that we have to pretend that Trump voters had sensible, well-thought out reasons for their choice, because I do not think that is the case.

I ALSO think that most voters in general, not just Trump voters, do not have sensible, well-thought out reasons for their voting choices, and there is plenty of evidence to back that up. I think humans simply aren’t the kinds of creatures who are good at making sensible choices about complicated, ideologically-charged topics.

None of this means that we should give up on democracy, just that there are some serious risks that come with democracy. And I disagree with this columnist’s scorn for Andrew Sullivan’s suggestion that we should think about ways to mitigate those risks. Plenty of people over the centuries, including the Founders of the USA, have worried about the tyranny of the majority. That worry isn’t just an invention of the modern-day snotty liberal elites, as this columnist seems to think.

Finally, I just want to ask this guy: is there ANY candidate about whom he would allow us to say “Shit, the American voters really screwed this one up”, or is that not possible by definition?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday I argued that the worst thing about Trump was the harm he does to democratic norms and institutions.

From some of the responses, I don’t think I successfully conveyed why that kind of harm is *uniquely* bad — some people seem to think “harms democratic institutions” is just one item in the overall pro-con list, and it just gets tallied up with the other pros and cons, on equal footing.

Let me try to explain why I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.

There’s this scene in the movie 300, where the Spartan king, Leonidas, feels insulted by the demands relayed by the Persian messenger, so he draws a sword on the man.

MESSENGER (shocked): “This is blasphemy, this is madness! No man threatens a messenger!”
… and he shoves the messenger off a cliff.

I think Leonidas is meant to come off as some kind of heroic, rule-breaking badass. But I watched that and thought, “Jesus, what a shitty thing to do.”

Not just because murder is shitty in general, or because murder is a disproportionate punishment for a perceived slight.

No, it’s because the “don’t harm a messenger” norm is what makes it possible for armies to send messengers to negotiate with each other, to avert or end wars. Defecting on that norm is so much worse than harming a particular person, or army, or country. It’s harming our *ability to limit harm to each other* — a meta-harm.

Our species has worked SO. DAMN. HARD. to build up enough collective trust to be able to have working institutions like constitutions, and treaties, and elections, and a free press, and peaceful transitions. And basically everything good in our lives depends on us collectively agreeing to treat those institutions seriously. I don’t care what party you’re in, or what policies you support — that should all come second to warding off meta-harms that undermine our ability to cooperate with each other enough to have a working society.

I’m not going to claim that politicians were perfect at respecting norms before Trump came along. But Trump is unprecedented. Partly in how blatant he is about his lack of respect for norms in general.

But also in how *discrete* his defections are — he’s not just incrementally bending norms that lots of other people before him have already bent.

We used to be able to say “In America, presidents don’t threaten to jail their political rivals.” Now we can’t.

We used to be able to say, “In America, presidents don’t sow doubts about the legitimacy of elections.” Now we can’t.

We used to be able to say, “In America, presidents don’t encourage violence against protesters.” Now we can’t.

Even joking about those norms, from someone in a position of power, undermines them. If Trump was actually joking about jailing Hillary, I suppose that’s better than if he was serious, but it still deals a blow to the norm. The health of the norm depends on us showing each other that we understand it’s important.

And I just feel despairing that so many Americans don’t seem to feel the same. Like, I don’t expect everyone to have thought through the game theory, but I just assumed people at least had an intuitive sense of these norms being sacred.

… And most of all, I’m worried that those of us who *do* feel shock at those norms being violated will gradually lose our sense of shock, as the post-Trump era wears on.

Update (Nov. 12) Since I apparently wasn’t, let me be perfectly clear. The fact that Trump’s voters unleashed a monster on the world does not make them evil or idiots. It “merely” makes them catastrophically mistaken. Just as I did (and took a lot flak for doing!) before the election, I will continue to oppose any efforts to harass individual Trump supporters, get them fired from their jobs, punish other people for associating with them, etc. To do that, while also militantly refusing to normalize Trump’s autocratic rule over the US, is admittedly to walk an incredibly narrow tightrope—and yet I don’t see anything on either side of the tightrope that’s consistent with my beliefs.

Some readers might also be interested in my reflections on being on the “same side” as Amanda Marcotte.

## What is there to say?

November 9th, 2016

Update (Nov. 10): In the wake of the US’s authoritarian takeover, I will sadly understand if foreign students and postdocs no longer wish to study in the US, or if foreign researchers no longer wish to enter the US even for conferences and visits. After all, I wouldn’t feel safe in Erdogan’s Turkey or the Mullahs’ Iran. In any case, I predict that the US’s scientific influence will now start to wane, as top researchers from elsewhere find ways to route around us.

I make just one request: if you do come to the US (as I selfishly hope you will), please don’t avoid places like Austin just because they look on the map like they’re in a sea of red. To understand what’s going on, you need to look at the detailed county-by-county results, which show that even in “red” states, most cities went overwhelmingly for Clinton, while even in “blue” states like New York, most rural areas went for Trump. Here’s Texas, for example (Austin was 66% Clinton, 27% Trump).

I’m ashamed of my country and terrified about the future.  When Bush took power in 2000, I was depressed for weeks, but I didn’t feel like I do now, like a fourth-generation refugee in the United States—like someone who happens to have been born here and will presumably continue to live here, unless and until it starts to become unsafe for academics, or Jews, or people who publicly criticize Trump, at which time I guess we’ll pack up and go somewhere else (assuming there still is a somewhere else).

If I ever missed the danger and excitement that so many European scientists and mathematicians felt in the 1930s, that sense of trying to pursue the truth even in the shadow of an aggressive and unironic evil—OK, I can cross that off the list.  Since I was seven years old or so, I’ve been obsessed by the realization that there are no guardrails that prevent human beings from choosing the worst, that all the adults who soothingly reassure you that “everything always works out okay in the end” are full of it.  Now I get to live through it instead of just reading about it in history books and having nightmares.

If James Comey hadn’t cast what turned out to be utterly unfounded suspicion over Hillary during the height of early voting, maybe the outcome would’ve been different.  If young and poor and minority voters in Wisconsin and North Carolina and elsewhere hadn’t been effectively disenfranchised through huge lines and strategic voter ID laws and closures of polling places, maybe the outcome would’ve been different.  If Russia and WikiLeaks hadn’t interfered by hacking one side and not the other, maybe the outcome would’ve been different.  For that matter, if Russia or some other power hacked the trivially-hackable electronic voting machines that lack paper trails—machines that something like a third of American voters still used this election—there’s an excellent chance we’d never find out.

But in some sense, all of that is beside the point.  For take all of it away, and Trump still would’ve at least come within a few terrifying points of winning—and as Scott Alexander rightly stresses, whatever horrible things are true about the American electorate today, would still have been true had Hillary eked out a narrow win.  It’s just that now we all get to enjoy the consequences of ½±ε of the country’s horrible values.

My immediate problem is that, this afternoon, I’m supposed to give a major physics colloquium at UT.  The title?  “Quantum Supremacy.”  That term, which had given me so much comedic mileage through the long campaign season (“will I disavow support from quantum supremacists?  I’ll keep you in suspense about it…” ), now just seems dark and horrible, a weight around my neck.  Yet, distracted and sleep-deprived and humor-deprived though I am, I’ve decided to power through and give the talk.  Why?  Because Steven Weinberg says he still wants to hear it.

I see no particular reason to revise anything I’ve said on this blog about the election, except perhaps for my uncritical quoting of all the analyses and prediction markets that gave Trump a small (but still, I stressed, much too high) probability of winning.

I stand by my contempt for the Electoral College, and my advocacy for vote-swapping.  The fact that vote-swapping once again failed doesn’t mean it was a bad idea; on the contrary, it means that we didn’t do enough.

I stand by my criticism of some of the excesses of the social justice movement, which seem to me to have played some role in spawning the predictable backlash whose horrific results the world now sees.

Lastly, I stand by what I said about the centrality of Enlightenment norms and values, and of civil discourse even with those with whom we disagree, to my own rejection of Trumpism.

On the other hand, the Trump supporters who are leaving me anonymous taunting comments can go elsewhere.  On this day, I think a wholly appropriate Enlightenment response to them is “fuck you.”

## Time to vote-swap

October 30th, 2016

I blogged about anti-Trump vote-swapping before (and did an interview at Huffington Post with Linchuan Zhang), but now, for my most in-depth look at the topic yet, check out my podcast interview with the incomparable Julia Galef, of “Rationally Speaking.”  Or if you’re bothered by my constant uhs and y’knows, I strongly recommend reading the transcript instead—I always sound smarter in print.

But don’t just read, act!  With only 9 days until the election, and with Hillary ahead but the race still surprisingly volatile, if you live in a swing state and support Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or Evan McMullin (but you nevertheless correctly regard Trump as the far greater evil than Hillary), or if you live in a relatively safe state and support Hillary (like I do), now is the time to find your vote-swap partner.  Remember that you and your partner can always back out later, by mutual consent, if the race changes (e.g., my vote-swap partner in Ohio has “released” me to vote for Hillary rather than Gary Johnson if, the night before Election Day, Texas looks like it might actually turn blue).

Just one thing: I recently got a crucial piece of intelligence about vote-swapping, which is to use the site TrumpTraders.org.  Previously, I’d been pointing people to another site called MakeMineCount.org, but my informants report that they never actually get assigned a match on that site, whereas they do right away on TrumpTraders.

Update (Nov. 6): Linchuan Zhang tells me that TrumpTraders.org currently has a deficit of several thousand Clinton supporters in safe states.  So if you’re such a person and you haven’t vote-swapped yet, please go there ASAP!

I’ve already voted for Gary Johnson in Texas, having “teleported” my Clinton vote to Ohio.  While Clinton’s position is stronger, it seems clear that the election will indeed be close, and Texas will not be in serious contention.

## My 5-minute quantum computing talk at the White House

October 25th, 2016

(OK, technically it was in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is not exactly the White House itself, but is adjacent to the West Wing in the White House complex.  And President Obama wasn’t there—maybe, like Justin Trudeau, he already knows everything about quantum computing?  But lots of people from the Office of Science and Technology Policy were!  And some of us talked with Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s adviser, when she passed us on her way to the West Wing.

The occasion was a Quantum Information Science policy workshop that OSTP held, and which the White House explicitly gave us permission to discuss on social media.  Indeed, John Preskill already tweeted photos from the event.  Besides me and Preskill, others in attendance included Umesh Vazirani, Seth Lloyd, Yaoyun Shi, Rob Schoelkopf, Krysta Svore, Hartmut Neven, Stephen Jordan…

I don’t know whether this is the first time that the polynomial hierarchy, or the notion of variation distance, were ever invoked in a speech at the White House.  But in any case, I was proud to receive a box of Hershey Kisses bearing the presidential seal.  I thought of not eating them, but then I got hungry, and realized that I can simply refill the box later if desired.

For regular readers of Shtetl-Optimized, my talk won’t have all that much that’s new, but in any case it’s short.

Incidentally, during the workshop, a guy from OSTP told me that, when he and others at the White House were asked to prepare materials about quantum computing, posts on Shtetl-Optimized (such as Shor I’ll Do It) were a huge help.  Honored though I was to have “served my country,” I winced, thinking about all the puerile doofosities I might’ve self-censored had I had any idea who might read them.  I didn’t dare ask whether anyone at the White House also reads the comment sections!

Thanks so much to all the other participants and to the organizers for a great workshop.  –SA)

Quantum Supremacy

by Scott Aaronson (UT Austin)

October 18, 2016

Thank you; it’s great to be here.  There are lots of directions that excite me enormously right now in quantum computing theory, which is what I work on.  For example, there’s the use of quantum computing to get new insight into classical computation, into condensed matter physics, and recently, even into the black hole information problem.

But since I have five minutes, I wanted to talk here about one particular direction—one that, like nothing else that I know of, bridges theory and experiment in the service of what we hope will be a spectacular result in the near future.  This direction is what’s known as “Quantum Supremacy”—John [Preskill], did you help popularize that term?  [John nods yes]—although some people have been backing away from the term recently, because of the campaign of one of the possible future occupants of this here complex.

But what quantum supremacy means to me, is demonstrating a quantum speedup for some task as confidently as possible.  Notice that I didn’t say a useful task!  I like to say that for me, the #1 application of quantum computing—more than codebreaking, machine learning, or even quantum simulation—is just disproving the people who say quantum computing is impossible!  So, quantum supremacy targets that application.

What is important for quantum supremacy is that we solve a clearly defined problem, with some relationship between inputs and outputs that’s independent of whatever hardware we’re using to solve the problem.  That’s part of why it doesn’t cut it to point to some complicated, hard-to-simulate molecule and say “aha!  quantum supremacy!”

One discovery, which I and others stumbled on 7 or 8 years ago, is that quantum supremacy seems to become much easier to demonstrate if we switch from problems with a single valid output to sampling problems: that is, problems of sampling exactly or approximately from some specified probability distribution.

Doing this has two advantages.  First, we no longer need a full, fault-tolerant quantum computer—in fact, very rudimentary types of quantum hardware appear to suffice.  Second, we can design sampling problems for which we can arguably be more confident that they really are hard for a classical computer, than we are that (say) factoring is classically hard.  I like to say that a fast classical factoring algorithm might collapse the world’s electronic commerce, but as far as we know, it wouldn’t collapse the polynomial hierarchy!  But with sampling problems, at least with exact sampling, we can often show the latter implication, which is about the best evidence you can possibly get for such a problem being hard in the present state of mathematics.

One example of these sampling tasks that we think are classically hard is BosonSampling, which Alex Arkhipov and I proposed in 2011.  BosonSampling uses a bunch of identical photons that are sent through a network of beamsplitters, then measured to count the number of photons in each output mode.  Over the past few years, this proposal has been experimentally demonstrated by quantum optics groups around the world, with the current record being a 6-photon demonstration by the O’Brien group in Bristol, UK.  A second example is the IQP (“Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial-Time”) or Commuting Hamiltonians model of Bremner, Jozsa, and Shepherd.

A third example—no doubt the simplest—is just to sample from the output distribution of a random quantum circuit, let’s say on a 2D square lattice of qubits with nearest-neighbor interactions.  Notably, this last task is one that the Martinis group at Google is working toward achieving right now, with 40-50 qubits.  They say that they’ll achieve it in as little as one or two years, which translated from experimental jargon, means maybe five years?  But not infinity years.

The challenges on the experimental side are clear: get enough qubits with long enough coherence times to achieve this.  But there are also some huge theoretical challenges remaining.

A first is, can we still solve classically hard sampling problems even in the presence of realistic experimental imperfections?  Arkhipov and I already thought about that problem—in particular, about sampling from a distribution that’s merely close in variation distance to the BosonSampling one—and got results that admittedly weren’t as satisfactory as the results for exact sampling.  But I’m delighted to say that, just within the last month or two, there have been some excellent new papers on the arXiv that tackle exactly this question, with both positive and negative results.

A second theoretical challenge is, how do we verify the results of a quantum supremacy experiment?  Note that, as far as we know today, verification could itself require classical exponential time.  But that’s not the showstopper that some people think, since we could target the “sweet spot” of 40-50 qubits, where classical verification is difficult (and in particular, clearly “costlier” than running the experiment itself), but also far from impossible with cluster computing resources.

If I have any policy advice, it’s this: recognize that a clear demonstration of quantum supremacy is at least as big a deal as (say) the discovery of the Higgs boson.  After this scientific milestone is achieved, I predict that the whole discussion of commercial applications of quantum computing will shift to a new plane, much like the Manhattan Project shifted to a new plane after Fermi built his pile under the Chicago stadium in 1942.  In other words: at this point, the most “applied” thing to do might be to set applications aside temporarily, and just achieve this quantum supremacy milestone—i.e., build the quantum computing Fermi pile—and thereby show the world that quantum computing speedups are a reality.  Thank you.

## May reason trump the Trump in all of us

October 19th, 2016

Two years ago, when I was the target of an online shaming campaign, what helped me through it were hundreds of messages of support from friends, slight acquaintances, and strangers of every background.  I vowed then to return the favor, by standing up when I saw decent people unfairly shamed.  Today I have an opportunity to make good.

Some time ago I had the privilege of interacting a bit with Sam Altman, president of the famed startup incubator Y Combinator (and a guy who’s thanked in pretty much everything Paul Graham writes).  By way of our mutual friend, the renowned former quantum computing researcher Michael Nielsen, Sam got in touch with me to solicit suggestions for “outside-the-box” scientists and writers, for a new grant program that Y Combinator was starting. I found Sam eager to delve into the merits of any suggestion, however outlandish, and was delighted to be able to make a difference for a few talented people who needed support.

Sam has also been one of the Silicon Valley leaders who’s written most clearly and openly about the threat to America posed by Donald Trump and the need to stop him, and he’s donated tens of thousands of dollars to anti-Trump causes.  Needless to say, I supported Sam on that as well.

Now Sam is under attack on social media, and there are even calls for him to resign as the president of Y Combinator.  Like me two years ago, Sam has instantly become the corporeal embodiment of the “nerd privilege” that keeps the marginalized out of Silicon Valley.

Why? Because, despite his own emphatic anti-Trump views, Sam rejected demands to fire Peter Thiel (who has an advisory role at Y Combinator) because of Thiel’s support for Trump.  Sam explained his reasoning at some length:

[A]s repugnant as Trump is to many of us, we are not going to fire someone over his or her support of a political candidate.  As far as we know, that would be unprecedented for supporting a major party nominee, and a dangerous path to start down (of course, if Peter said some of the things Trump says himself, he would no longer be part of Y Combinator) … The way we got into a situation with Trump as a major party nominee in the first place was by not talking to people who are very different than we are … I don’t understand how 43% of the country supports Trump.  But I’d like to find out, because we have to include everyone in our path forward.  If our best ideas are to stop talking to or fire anyone who disagrees with us, we’ll be facing this whole situation again in 2020.

The usual criticism of nerds is that we might have narrow technical abilities, but we lack wisdom about human affairs.  It’s ironic, then, that it appears to have fallen to Silicon Valley nerds to guard some of the most important human wisdom our sorry species ever came across—namely, the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.  Like Sam, I despise pretty much everything Trump stands for, and I’ve been far from silent about it: I’ve blogged, donated money, advocated vote swapping, endured anonymous comments like “kill yourself kike”—whatever seemed like it might help even infinitesimally to ensure the richly-deserved electoral thrashing that Trump mercifully seems to be headed for in a few weeks.

But I also, I confess, oppose the forces that apparently see Trump less as a global calamity to be averted, than as a golden opportunity to take down anything they don’t like that’s ever been spotted within a thousand-mile radius of Trump Tower.  (Where does this Kevin Bacon game end, anyway?  Do “six degrees of Trump” suffice to contaminate you?)

And not only do I not feel a shadow of a hint of a moral conflict here, but it seems to me that precisely the same liberal Enlightenment principles are behind both of these stances.

But I’d go yet further.  It sort of flabbergasts me when social-justice activists don’t understand that, if we condemn not only Trump, not only his supporters, but even vociferous Trump opponents who associate with Trump supporters (!), all we’ll do is feed the narrative that got Trumpism as far as it has—namely, that of a smug, bubble-encased, virtue-signalling leftist elite subject to runaway political correctness spirals.  Like, a hundred million Americans’ worldviews revolve around the fear of liberal persecution, and we’re going to change their minds by firing anyone who refuses to fire them?  As a recent Washington Post story illustrates, the opposite approach is harder but can bear spectacular results.

Now, as for Peter Thiel: three years ago, he funded a small interdisciplinary workshop on the coast of France that I attended.  With me there were a bunch of honest-to-goodness conservative Christians, a Freudian psychoanalyst, a novelist, a right-wing radio host, some scientists and Silicon Valley executives, and of course Thiel himself.  Each, I found, offered tons to disagree about but also some morsels to learn.

Thiel’s worldview, focused on the technological and organizational greatness that (in his view) Western civilization used to have and has subsequently lost, was a bit too dark and pessimistic for me, and I’m a pretty dark and pessimistic person.  Thiel gave a complicated, meandering lecture that involved comparing modern narratives about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs against myths of gods, heroes, and martyrs throughout history, such as Romulus and Remus (the legendary founders of Rome).  The talk might have made more sense to Thiel than to his listeners.

At the same time, Thiel’s range of knowledge and curiosity was pretty awesome.  He avidly followed all the talks (including mine, on P vs. NP and quantum complexity theory) and asked pertinent questions. When the conversation turned to D-Wave, and Thiel’s own decision not to invest in it, he laid out the conclusions he’d come to from an extremely quick look at the question, then quizzed me as to whether he’d gotten anything wrong.  He hadn’t.

From that conversation among others, I formed the impression that Thiel’s success as an investor is, at least in part, down neither to luck nor to connections, but to a module in his brain that most people lack, which makes blazingly fast and accurate judgments about tech startups.  No wonder Y Combinator would want to keep him as an adviser.

But, OK, I’m so used to the same person being spectacularly right on some things and spectacularly wrong on others, that it no longer causes even slight cognitive dissonance.  You just take the issues one by one.

I was happy, on balance, when it came out that Thiel had financed the lawsuit that brought down Gawker Media.  Gawker really had used its power to bully the innocent, and it had broken the law to do it.  And if it’s an unaccountable, anti-egalitarian, billionaire Godzilla against a vicious, privacy-violating, nerd-baiting King Kong—well then, I guess I’m with Godzilla.

More recently, I was appalled when Thiel spoke at the Republican convention, pandering to the crowd with Fox-News-style attack lines that were unworthy of a mind of his caliber.  I lost a lot of respect for Thiel that day.  But that’s the thing: unlike with literally every other speaker at the GOP convention, my respect for Thiel had started from a point that made a decrease possible.

I reject huge parts of Thiel’s worldview.  I also reject any worldview that would threaten me with ostracism for talking to Thiel, attending a workshop he sponsors, or saying anything good about him.  This is not actually a difficult balance.

Today, when it sometimes seems like much of the world has united in salivating for a cataclysmic showdown between whites and non-whites, Christians and Muslims, “dudebros” and feminists, etc., and that the salivators differ mostly just in who they want to see victorious in the coming battle and who humiliated, it can feel lonely to stick up for naïve, outdated values like the free exchange of ideas, friendly disagreement, the presumption of innocence, and the primacy of the individual over the tribe.  But those are the values that took us all the way from a bronze spear through the enemy’s heart to a snarky rebuttal on the arXiv, and they’ll continue to build anything worth building.

And now to watch the third debate (I’ll check the comments afterward)…

Update (Oct. 20): See also this post from a blog called TheMoneyIllusion. My favorite excerpt:

So let’s see. Not only should Trump be shunned for his appalling political views, an otherwise highly respected Silicon Valley entrepreneur who just happens to support Trump (along with 80 million other Americans) should also be shunned. And a person who despises Trump and works against him but who defends Thiel’s right to his own political views should also resign. Does that mean I should be shunned too? After all, I’m a guy who hates Trump, writing a post that defends a guy who hates Trump, who wrote a post defending a guy’s freedom to support Trump, who in turn supports Trump. And suppose my mother sticks up for me? Should she also be shunned?

It’s almost enough to make me vote . . . no, just kidding.

Question … Which people on the left are beyond the pale? Suppose Thiel had supported Hugo Chavez? How about Castro? Mao? Pol Pot? Perhaps the degrees of separation could be calibrated to the awfulness of the left-winger:

Chavez: One degree of separation. (Corbyn, Sean Penn, etc.)

Castro: Two degrees of separation is still toxic.

Lenin: Three degrees of separation.

Mao: Four degrees of separation.

Pol Pot: Five degrees of separation.

## Avi Wigderson’s “Permanent” Impact on Me

October 12th, 2016

The following is the lightly-edited transcript of a talk that I gave a week ago, on Wednesday October 5, at Avi Wigderson’s 60th birthday conference at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  Videos of all the talks (including mine) are now available here.

Thanks so much to Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Ran Raz, Peter Sarnak, and Amir Shpilka for organizing the conference and for inviting me to speak; to all the other participants and speakers for a great conference; and of course to Avi himself for being Avi. –SA

I apologize that I wasn’t able to prepare slides for today’s talk. But the good news is that, ever since I moved to Texas two months ago, I now carry concealed chalk everywhere I go. [Pull chalk out of pocket]

My history with Avi goes back literally half my life. I spent a semester with him at Hebrew University, and then a year with him as a postdoc here at IAS. Avi has played a bigger role in my career than just about anyone—he helped me professionally, he helped me intellectually, and once I dated and then married an Israeli theoretical computer scientist (who was also a postdoc in Avi’s group), Avi even helped me learn Hebrew. Just today, Avi taught me the Hebrew word for the permanent of a matrix. It turns out that it’s [throaty noises] pehhrmahnent.

But it all started with a talk that Avi gave in Princeton in 2000, which I attended as a prospective graduate student. That talk was about the following function of an n×n matrix A∈Rn×n, the permanent:

$$\text{Per}(A) = \sum_{\sigma \in S_n} \prod_{i=1}^n a_{i,\sigma(i)}.$$

Avi contrasted that function with a superficially similar function, the determinant:

$$\text{Det}(A) = \sum_{\sigma \in S_n} (-1)^{\text{sgn}(\sigma)} \prod_{i=1}^n a_{i,\sigma(i)}.$$

In this talk, I want to share a few of the amazing things Avi said about these two functions, and how the things he said then reverberated through my entire career.

Firstly, like we all learn in kindergarten or whatever, the determinant is computable in polynomial time, for example by using Gaussian elimination. By contrast, Valiant proved in 1979 that computing the permanent is #P-complete—which means, at least as hard as any combinatorial counting problem, a class believed to be even harder than NP-complete.

So, despite differing from each other only by some innocent-looking -1 factors, which the determinant has but the permanent lacks, these two functions effectively engage different regions of mathematics. The determinant is linear-algebraic and geometric; it’s the product of the eigenvalues and the volume of the parallelipiped defined by the row vectors. But the permanent is much more stubbornly combinatorial. It’s not quite as pervasive in mathematics as the determinant is, though it does show up. As an example, if you have a bipartite graph G, then the permanent of G’s adjacency matrix counts the number of perfect matchings in G.

When n=2, computing the permanent doesn’t look too different from computing the determinant: indeed, we have

$$\text{Per}\left( \begin{array} [c]{cc}% a & b\\ c & d \end{array} \right) =\text{Det}\left( \begin{array} [c]{cc}% a & -b\\ c & d \end{array} \right).$$

But as n gets larger, the fact that the permanent is #P-complete means that it must get exponentially harder to compute than the determinant, unless basic complexity classes collapse. And indeed, to this day, the fastest known algorithm to compute an n×n permanent, Ryser’s algorithm, takes O(n2n) time, which is only modestly better than the brute-force algorithm that just sums all n! terms.

Yet interestingly, not everything about the permanent is hard. So for example, if A is nonnegative, then in 1997, Jerrum, Sinclair, and Vigoda famously gave a polynomial-time randomized algorithm to approximate Per(A) to within a 1+ε multiplicative factor, for ε>0 as small as you like. As an even simpler example, if A is nonnegative and you just want to know whether its permanent is zero or nonzero, that’s equivalent to deciding whether a bipartite graph has at least one perfect matching. And we all know that that can be done in polynomial time.

OK, but the usual algorithm from the textbooks that puts the matching problem in the class P is already a slightly nontrivial one—maybe first grade rather than kindergarten! It involves repeatedly using depth-first search to construct augmenting paths, then modifying the graph, etc. etc.

Sixteen years ago in Princeton, the first thing Avi said that blew my mind is that there’s a vastly simpler polynomial-time algorithm to decide whether a bipartite graph has a perfect matching—or equivalently, to decide whether a nonnegative matrix has a zero or nonzero permanent. This algorithm is not quite as efficient as the textbook one, but it makes up for it by being more magical.

So here’s what you do: you start with the 0/1 adjacency matrix of your graph. I’ll do a 2×2 example, since that’s all I’ll be able to compute on the fly:

$$\left( \begin{array} [c]{cc}% 1 & 1\\ 0 & 1 \end{array} \right).$$

Then you normalize each row so it sums to 1. In the above example, this would give

$$\left( \begin{array} [c]{cc}% \frac{1}{2} & \frac{1}{2} \\ 0 & 1 \end{array} \right).$$

Next you normalize each column so it sums to 1:

$$\left( \begin{array} [c]{cc}% 1 & \frac{1}{3} \\ 0 & \frac{2}{3} \end{array} \right).$$

OK, but now the problem is that the rows are no longer normalized, so you normalize them again:

$$\left( \begin{array} [c]{cc}% \frac{3}{4} & \frac{1}{4} \\ 0 & 1 \end{array} \right).$$

Then you normalize the columns again, and so on. You repeat something like n3log(n) times. If, after that time, all the row sums and column sums have become within ±1/n of 1, then you conclude that the permanent was nonzero and the graph had a perfect matching. Otherwise, the permanent was zero and the graph had no perfect matching.

What gives? Well, it’s a nice exercise to prove why this works. I’ll just give you a sketch: first, when you multiply any row or column of a matrix by a scalar, you multiply the permanent by that same scalar. By using that fact, together with the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality, it’s possible to prove that, in every iteration but the first, when you rebalance all the rows or all the columns to sum to 1, you can’t be decreasing the permanent. The permanent increases monotonically.

Second, if the permanent is nonzero, then after the first iteration it’s at least 1/nn, simply because we started with a matrix of 0’s and 1’s.

Third, the permanent is always at most the product of the row sums or the product of the column sums, which after the first iteration is 1.

Fourth, at any iteration where there’s some row sum or column sum that’s far from 1, rescaling must not only increase the permanent, but increase it by an appreciable amount—like, a 1+1/n2 factor or so.

Putting these four observations together, we find that if the permanent is nonzero, then our scaling procedure must terminate after a polynomial number of steps, with every row sum and every column sum close to 1—since otherwise, the permanent would just keep on increasing past its upper bound of 1.

But a converse statement is also true. Suppose the matrix can be scaled so that every row sum and every column sum gets within ±1/n of 1. Then the rescaled entries define a flow through the bipartite graph, with roughly the same amount of flow through each of the 2n vertices. But if such a flow exists, then Hall’s Theorem tells you that there must be a perfect matching (and hence the permanent must be nonzero)—since if a matching didn’t exist, then there would necessarily be a bottleneck preventing the flow.

Together with Nati Linial and Alex Samorodnitsky, Avi generalized this to show that scaling the rows and columns gives you a polynomial-time algorithm to approximate the permanent of a nonnegative matrix. This basically follows from the so-called Egorychev-Falikman Theorem, which says that the permanent of a doubly stochastic matrix is at least n!/nn. The approximation ratio that you get this way, ~en, isn’t nearly as good as Jerrum-Sinclair-Vigoda’s, but the advantage is that the algorithm is deterministic (and also ridiculously simple).

For myself, though, I just filed away this idea of matrix scaling for whenever I might need it. It didn’t take long. A year after Avi’s lecture, when I was a beginning grad student at Berkeley, I was obsessing about the foundations of quantum mechanics. Specifically, I was obsessing about the fact that, when you measure a quantum state, the rules of quantum mechanics tell you how to calculate the probability that you’ll see a particular outcome. But the rules are silent about so-called multiple-time or transition probabilities. In other words: suppose we adopt Everett’s Many-Worlds view, according to which quantum mechanics needs to be applied consistently to every system, regardless of scale, so in particular, the state of the entire universe (including us) is a quantum superposition state. We perceive just one branch, but there are also these other branches where we made different choices or where different things happened to us, etc.

OK, fine: for me, that’s not the troubling part! The troubling part is that quantum mechanics rejects as meaningless questions like the following: given that you’re in this branch of the superposition at time t1, what’s the probability that you’ll be in that branch at time t2, after some unitary transformation is applied? Orthodox quantum mechanics would say: well, either someone measured you at time t1, in which case their act of measuring collapsed the superposition and created a whole new situation. Or else no one measured at t1—but in that case, your state at time t1 was the superposition state, full stop. It’s sheer metaphysics to imagine a “real you” that jumps around from one branch of the superposition to another, having a sequence of definite experiences.

Granted, in practice, branches of the universe’s superposition that split from each other tend never to rejoin, for the same thermodynamic reasons why eggs tend never to unscramble themselves. And as long as the history of the Everettian multiverse has the structure of a tree, we can sensibly define transition probabilities. But if, with some technology of the remote future, we were able to do quantum interference experiments on human brains (or other conscious entities), the rules of quantum mechanics would no longer predict what those beings should see—not even probabilistically.

I was interested in the question: suppose we just wanted to postulate transition probabilities, with the transitions taking place in some fixed orthogonal basis. What would be a mathematically reasonable way to do that? And it occurred to me that one thing you could do is the following. Suppose for simplicity that you have a pure quantum state, which is just a unit vector of n complex numbers called amplitudes:

$$\left( \begin{array} [c]{c}% \alpha_{1}\\ \vdots\\ \alpha_{n}% \end{array} \right)$$

Then the first rule of quantum mechanics says that you can apply any unitary transformation U (that is, any norm-preserving linear transformation) to map this state to a new one:

$$\left( \begin{array} [c]{c}% \beta_{1}\\ \vdots\\ \beta_{n}% \end{array} \right) =\left( \begin{array} [c]{ccc}% u_{11} & \cdots & u_{1n}\\ \vdots & \ddots & \vdots\\ u_{n1} & \cdots & u_{nn}% \end{array} \right) \left( \begin{array} [c]{c}% \alpha_{1}\\ \vdots\\ \alpha_{n}% \end{array} \right).$$

The second rule of quantum mechanics, the famous Born Rule, says that if you measure in the standard basis before applying U, then the probability that you’ll find youself in state i equals |αi|2. Likewise, if you measure in the standard basis after applying U, the probability that you’ll find youself in state j equals |βj|2.

OK, but what’s the probability that you’re in state i at the initial time, and then state j at the final time? These joint probabilities, call them pij, had better add up to |αi|2 and |βj|2, if we sum the rows and columns respectively. And ideally, they should be “derived” in some way from the unitary U—so that for example, if uij=0 then pij=0 as well.

So here’s something you could do: start by replacing each uij by its absolute value, to get a nonnegative matrix. Then, normalize the ith row so that it sums to |αi|2, for each i. Then normalize the jth column so that it sums to |βj|2, for each j. Then normalize the rows, then the columns, and keep iterating until hopefully you end up with all the rows and columns having the right sums.

So the first question I faced was, does this process converge? And I remembered what Avi taught me about the permanent. In this case, because of the nonuniform row and column scalings, the permanent no longer works as a progress measure, but there’s something else that does work. Namely, as a first step, we can use the Max-Flow/Min-Cut Theorem to show that there exists a nonnegative matrix F=(fij) such that fij=0 whenever uij=0, and also

$$\sum_j f_{ij} = \left|\alpha_i\right|^2 \forall i,\ \ \ \ \ \sum_i f_{ij} = \left|\beta_j\right|^2 \forall j.$$

Then, letting M=(mij) be our current rescaled matrix (so that initially mij:=|uij|), we use

$$\prod_{i,j : u_{ij}\ne 0} m_{ij}^{f_{ij}}$$

as our progress measure. By using the nonnegativity of the Kullback-Leibler divergence, one can prove that this quantity never decreases. So then, just like with 0/1 matrices and the permanent, we get eventual convergence, and indeed convergence after a number of iterations that’s polynomial in n.

I was pretty stoked about this until I went to the library, and discovered that Erwin Schrödinger had proposed the same matrix scaling process in 1931! And Masao Nagasawa and others then rigorously analyzed it. OK, but their motivations were somewhat different, and for some reason they never talked about finite-dimensional matrices, only infinite-dimensional ones.

I can’t resist telling you my favorite open problem about this matrix scaling process: namely, is it stable under small perturbations? In other words, if I change one of the αi‘s or uij‘s by some small ε, then do the final pij‘s also change by at most some small δ? To clarify, several people have shown me how to prove that the mapping to the pij‘s is continuous. But for computer science applications, one needs something stronger: namely that when the matrix M, and the row and column scalings, actually arise from a unitary matrix in the way above, we get strong uniform continuity, with a 1/nO(1) change to the inputs producing only a 1/nO(1) change to the outputs (and hopefully even better than that).

The more general idea that I was groping toward or reinventing here is called a hidden-variable theory, of which the most famous example is Bohmian mechanics. Again, though, Bohmian mechanics has the defect that it’s only formulated for some exotic state space that the physicists care about for some reason—a space involving pointlike objects called “particles” that move around in 3 Euclidean dimensions (why 3? why not 17?).

Anyway, this whole thing led me to wonder: under the Schrödinger scaling process, or something like it, what’s the computational complexity of sampling an entire history of the hidden variable through a quantum computation? (“If, at the moment of your death, your whole life history flashes before you in an instant, what can you then efficiently compute?”)

Clearly the complexity is at least BQP (i.e., quantum polynomial time), because even sampling where the hidden variable is at a single time is equivalent to sampling the output distribution of a quantum computer. But could the complexity be even more than BQP, because of the correlations between the hidden variable values at different times? I noticed that, indeed, sampling a hidden variable history would let you do some crazy-seeming things, like solve the Graph Isomorphism problem in polynomial time (OK, fine, that seemed more impressive at the time than it does after Babai’s breakthrough), or find collisions in arbitrary cryptographic hash functions, or more generally, solve any problem in the complexity class SZK (Statistical Zero Knowledge).

But you might ask: what evidence do we have that any these problems are hard even for garden-variety quantum computers? As many of you know, it’s widely conjectured today that NP⊄BQP—i.e., that quantum computers can’t solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. And in the “black box” setting, where all you know how to do is query candidate solutions to your NP-complete problem to check whether they’re valid, it’s been proven that quantum computers don’t give you an exponential speedup: the best they can give is the square-root speedup of Grover’s algorithm.

But for these SZK problems, like finding collisions in hash functions, who the hell knows? So, this is the line of thought that led me to probably the most important thing I did in grad school, the so-called quantum lower bound for collision-finding. That result says that, if (again) your hash function is only accessible as a black box, then a quantum computer can provide at most a polynomial speedup over a classical computer for finding collisions in it (in this case, it turns out, at most a two-thirds power speedup). There are several reasons you might care about that, such as showing that one of the basic building blocks of modern cryptography could still be secure in a world with quantum computers, or proving an oracle separation between SZK and BQP. But my original motivation was just to understand how transition probabilities would change quantum computation.

The permanent has also shown up in a much more direct way in my work on quantum computation. If we go back to Avi’s lecture from 2000, a second thing he said that blew my mind was that apparently, or so he had heard, even the fundamental particles of the universe know something about the determinant and the permanent. In particular, he said, fermions—the matter particles, like the quarks and electrons in this stage—have transition amplitudes that are determinants of matrices. Meanwhile, bosons—the force-carrying particles, like the photons coming from the ceiling that let you see this talk—have transition amplitudes that are permanents of matrices.

Or as Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists on earth, memorably put it in the first edition of his recent quantum mechanics textbook: “in the case of bosons, it is also a determinant, except without minus signs.” I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Weinberg at Austin, so recently I asked him about that line. He told me that of course he knew that the determinant without minus signs is called a permanent, but he thought no one else would know! As far as he knew, the permanent was just some esoteric function used by a few quantum field theorists who needed to calculate boson amplitudes.

Briefly, the reason why the permanent and determinant turn up here is the following: whenever you have n particles that are identical, to calculate the amplitude for them to do something, you need to sum over all n! possible permutations of the particles. Furthermore, each contribution to the sum is a product of n complex numbers, one uij for each particle that hops from i to j. But there’s a difference: when you swap two identical bosons, nothing happens, and that’s why bosons give rise to the permanent (of an n×n complex matrix, if there are n bosons). By contrast, when you swap two identical fermions, the amplitude for that state of the universe gets multiplied by -1, and that’s why fermions give rise to the determinant.

Anyway, Avi ended his talk with a quip about how unfair it seemed to the bosons that they should have to work so much harder than the fermions just to calculate where they should be!

And then that one joke of Avi—that way of looking at things—rattled around in my head for a decade, like a song I couldn’t get rid of. It raised the question: wait a minute, bosons—particles that occur in Nature—are governed by a #P-complete function? Does that mean we could actually use bosons to solve #P-complete problems in polynomial time? That seems ridiculous, like the kind of nonsense I’m fighting every few weeks on my blog! As I said before, most of us don’t even expect quantum computers to be able to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, let alone #P-complete ones.

As it happens, Troyansky and Tishby had already taken up that puzzle in 1996. (Indeed Avi, being the social butterfly and hub node of our field that he is, had learned about the role of permaments and determinants in quantum mechanics from them.) What Troyansky and Tishby said was, it’s true that if you have a system of n identical, non-interacting bosons, their transition amplitudes are given by permanents of n×n matrices. OK, but amplitudes in quantum mechanics are not directly observable. They’re just what you use to calculate the probability that you’ll see this or that measurement outcome. But if you try to encode a hard instance of a #P-complete problem into a bosonic system, the relevant amplitudes will in general be exponentially small. And that means that, if you want a decent estimate of the permanent, you’ll need to repeat the experiment an exponential number of times. So OK, they said, nice try, but this doesn’t give you a computational advantage after all in calculating the permanent compared to classical brute force.

In our 2011 work on BosonSampling, my student Alex Arkhipov and I reopened the question. We said, not so fast. It’s true that bosons don’t seem to help you in estimating the permanent of a specific matrix of your choice. But what if your goal was just to sample a random n×n matrix A∈Cn×n, in a way that’s somehow biased toward matrices with larger permanents? Now, why would that be your goal? I have no idea! But this sampling is something that a bosonic system would easily let you do.

So, what Arkhipov and I proved was that this gives rise to a class of probability distributions that can be sampled in quantum polynomial time (indeed, by a very rudimentary type of quantum computer), but that can’t be sampled in classical polynomial time unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the third level. And even though you’re not solving a #P-complete problem, the #P-completeness of the permanent still plays a crucial role in explaining why the sampling problem is hard. (Basically, one proves that the probabilities are #P-hard even to approximate, but that if there were a fast classical sampling algorithm, then the probabilities could be approximated in the class BPPNP. So if a fast classical sampling algorithm existed, then P#P would equal BPPNP, which would collapse the polynomial hierarchy by Toda’s Theorem.)

When we started on this, Arkhipov and I thought about it as just pure complexity theory—conceptually clarifying what role the #P-completeness of the permanent plays in physics. But then at some point it occurred to us: bosons (such as photons) actually exist, and experimentalists in quantum optics like to play with them, so maybe they could demonstrate some of this stuff in the lab. And as it turned out, the quantum optics people were looking for something to do at the time, and they ate it up.

Over the past five years, a trend has arisen in experimental physics that goes by the name “Quantum Supremacy,” although some people are now backing away from the name because of Trump. The idea is: without yet having a universal quantum computer, can we use the hardware that we’re able to build today to demonstrate the reality of a quantum-computational speedup as clearly as possible? Not necessarily for a useful problem, but just for some problem? Of course, no experiment can prove that something is scaling polynomially rather than exponentially, since that’s an asymptotic statement. But an experiment could certainly raise the stakes for the people who deny such a statement—for example, by solving something a trillion times faster than we know how to solve it otherwise, using methods for which we don’t know a reason for them not to scale.

I like to say that for me, the #1 application of quantum computing, more than breaking RSA or even simulating physics and chemistry, is simply disproving the people who say that quantum computing is impossible! So, quantum supremacy targets that application.

Experimental BosonSampling has become a major part of the race to demonstrate quantum supremacy. By now, at least a half-dozen groups around the world have reported small-scale implementations—the record, so far, being an experiment at Bristol that used 6 photons, and experimentally confirmed that, yes, their transition amplitudes are given by permanents of 6×6 complex matrices. The challenge now is to build single-photon sources that are good enough that you could scale up to (let’s say) 30 photons, which is where you’d really start seeing a quantum advantage over the best known classical algorithms. And again, this whole quest really started with Avi’s joke.

A year after my and Arkhipov’s work, I noticed that one also can run the connection between quantum optics and the permanent in the “reverse” direction. In other words: with BosonSampling, we used the famous theorem of Valiant, that the permanent is #P-complete, to help us argue that bosons can solve hard sampling problems. But if we know by some other means that quantum optics lets us encode #P-complete problems, then we can use that to give an independent, “quantum” proof that the permanent is #P-complete in the first place! As it happens, there is another way to see why quantum optics lets us encode #P-complete problems. Namely, we can use celebrated work by Knill, Laflamme, and Milburn (KLM) from 2001, which showed how to perform universal quantum computation using quantum optics with the one additional resource of “feed-forward measurements.” With minor modifications, the construction by KLM also lets us encode a #P-complete problem into a bosonic amplitude, which we know is a permanent—thereby proving that the permanent is #P-complete, in what I personally regard as a much more intuitive way than Valiant’s original approach based on cycle covers. This illustrates a theme that we’ve seen over and over in the last 13 years or so, which is the use of quantum methods and arguments to gain insight even about classical computation.

Admittedly, I wasn’t proving anything here in classical complexity theory that wasn’t already known, just giving a different proof for an old result! Extremely recently, however, my students Daniel Grier and Luke Schaeffer have extended my argument based on quantum optics, to show that computing the permanent of a unitary or orthogonal matrix is #P-complete. (Indeed, even over finite fields of characteristic k, computing the permanent of an orthogonal matrix is a ModkP-complete problem, as long as k is not 2 or 3—which turns out to be the tight answer.) This is not a result that we previously knew by any means, whether quantum or classical.

I can’t resist telling you the biggest theoretical open problem that arose from my and Arkhipov’s work. We would like to say: even if you had a polynomial-time algorithm that sampled a probability distribution that was merely close, in variation distance, to the BosonSampling distribution, that would already imply a collapse of the polynomial hierarchy. But we’re only able to prove that assuming a certain problem is #P-complete, which no one has been able to prove #P-complete. That problem is the following:

Given an n×n matrix A, each of whose entries is an i.i.d. complex Gaussian with mean 0 and variance 1 (that is, drawn from N(0,1)C), estimate |Per(A)|2, to within additive error ±ε·n!, with probability at least 1-δ over the choice of A. Do this in time polynomial in n, 1/ε, and 1/δ.

Note that, if you care about exactly computing the permanent of a Gaussian random matrix, or about approximating the permanent of an arbitrary matrix, we know how to prove both of those problems #P-complete. The difficulty “only” arises when we combine approximation and average-case in the same problem.

At the moment, we don’t even know something more basic, which is: what’s the distribution over |Per(A)|2, when A is an n×n matrix of i.i.d. N(0,1)C Gaussians? Based on numerical evidence, we conjecture that the distribution converges to lognormal as n gets large. By using the interpretation of the determinant as the volume of a parallelipiped, we can prove that the distribution over |Det(A)|2 converges to lognormal. And the distribution over |Per(A)|2 looks almost the same when you plot it. But not surprisingly, the permanent is harder to analyze.

This brings me to my final vignette. Why would anyone even suspect that approximating the permanent of a Gaussian random matrix would be a #P-hard problem? Well, because if you look at the permanent of an n×n matrix over a large enough finite field, say Fp, that function famously has the property of random self-reducibility. This means: the ability to calculate such a permanent in polynomial time, on 90% all matrices in Fpn×n, or even for that matter on only 1% of them, implies the ability to calculate it in polynomial time on every such matrix.

The reason for this is simply that the permanent is a low-degree polynomial, and low-degree polynomials have extremely useful error-correcting properties. In particular, if you can compute such a polynomial on any large fraction of points, then you can do noisy polynomial interpolation (e.g., the Berlekamp-Welch algorithm, or list decoding), in order to get the value of the polynomial on an arbitrary point.

I don’t specifically remember Avi talking about the random self-reducibility of the permanent in his 2000 lecture, but he obviously would have talked about it! And it was really knowing about the random self-reducibility of the permanent, and how powerful it was, that let me and Alex Arkhipov to the study of BosonSampling in the first place.

In complexity theory, the random self-reducibility of the permanent is hugely important because it was sort of the spark for some of our most convincing examples of non-relativizing results—that is, results that fail relative to a suitable oracle. The most famous such result is that #P, and for that matter even PSPACE, admit interactive protocols (the IP=PSPACE theorem). In the 1970s, Baker, Gill, and Solovay pointed out that non-relativizing methods would be needed to resolve P vs. NP and many of the other great problems of the field.

In 2007, Avi and I wrote our only joint paper so far. In that paper, we decided to take a closer look at the non-relativizing results based on interactive proofs. We said: while it’s true that these results don’t relativize—that is, there are oracles relative to which they fail—nevertheless, these results hold relative to all oracles that themselves encode low-degree polynomials over finite fields (such as the permanent). So, introducing a term, Avi and I said that results like IP=PSPACE algebrize.

But then we also showed that, if you want to prove P≠NP—or for that matter, even prove circuit lower bounds that go “slightly” beyond what’s already known (such as NEXPP/poly)—you’ll need techniques that are not only non-relativizing, but also non-algebrizing. So in some sense, the properties of the permanent that are used (for example) in proving that it has an interactive protocol, just “aren’t prying the black box open wide enough.”

I have a more recent result, from 2011 or so, that I never got around to finishing a paper about. In this newer work, I decided to take another look at the question: what is it about the permanent that actually fails to relativize? And I prove the following result: relative to an arbitrary oracle A, the class #P has complete problems that are both random self-reducible and downward self-reducible (that is, reducible to smaller instances of the same problem). So, contrary to what certainly I and maybe others had often thought, it’s not the random self-reducibility of the permanent that’s the crucial thing about it. What’s important, instead, is a further property that the permanent has, of being self-checkable and self-correctible.

In other words: given (say) a noisy circuit for the permanent, it’s not just that you can correct that circuit to compute whichever low-degree polynomial it was close to computing. Rather, it’s that you can confirm that the polynomial is in fact the permanent, and nothing else.

I like the way Ketan Mulmuley thinks about this phenomenon in his Geometric Complexity Theory, which is a speculative, audacious program to try to prove that the permanent is harder than the determinant, and to tackle the other great separation questions of complexity theory (including P vs. NP), by using algebraic geometry and representation theory. Mulmuley says: the permanent is a polynomial in the entries of an n×n matrix that not only satisfies certain symmetries (e.g., under interchanging rows or columns), but is uniquely characterized by those symmetries. In other words, if you find a polynomial that passes certain tests—for example, if it behaves in the right way under rescaling and interchanging rows and columns—then that polynomial must be the permanent, or a scalar multiple of the permanent. Similarly, if you find a polynomial that passes the usual interactive proof for the permanent, that polynomial must be the permanent. I think this goes a long way toward explaining why the permanent is so special: it’s not just any hard-to-compute, low-degree polynomial; it’s one that you can recognize when you come across it.

I’ve now told you about the eventual impact of one single survey talk that Avi gave 16 years ago—not even a particularly major or important one. So you can only imagine what Avi’s impact must have been on all of us, if you integrate over all the talks he’s given and papers he’s written and young people he’s mentored and connections he’s made his entire career. May that impact be permanent.

## Stuff That’s Happened

October 9th, 2016

Hi from FOCS’2016 in scenic New Brunswick, NJ!  (I just got here from Avi Wigderson’s 60th birthday conference, to which I’ll devote another post.)

In the few weeks since I last overcame the activation barrier to blog, here are some things that happened.

Politics

Friday’s revelation, of Trump boasting on tape to George W. Bush’s cousin about his crotch-grabbing escapades, did not increase my opposition to Trump, for a very simple reason: because I’d already opposed Trump by the maximum amount that’s possible.  Nevertheless, I’ll be gratified if this news brings Trump down, and leads to the landslide defeat he’s deserved from the beginning for 101000 reasons.

Still, history (including the history of this election) teaches us not to take things for granted.  So if you’re still thinking of voting for Trump, let me recommend Scott Alexander’s endorsement of “anyone but Trump.”  I’d go even further than my fellow Scott A. in much of what he says, but his post is nevertheless a masterful document, demonstrating how someone who nobody could accuse of being a statist social-justice warrior, but who “merely” has a sense for science and history and Enlightenment ideals and the ironic and absurd, can reach the conclusion that Trump had better be stopped, and with huge argumentative margin to spare.

See also an interview with me on Huffington Post about TrumpTrading, conducted by Linchuan Zhang.  If you live in a swing state and support Johnson, or in a safe state and support Hillary, I still recommend signing up, since even a 13% probability of a Trump win is too high.  I’ve found a partner in Ohio, a libertarian-leaning professor.  The only way I can foresee not going through with the swap, is if the bus tape causes Trump’s popularity to drop so precipitously that Texas becomes competitive.

In the meantime, it’s also important that we remain vigilant about the integrity of the election—not about in-person voter fraud, which statistically doesn’t exist, but about intimidation at the polls and the purging of eligible voters and tampering with electronic voting machines.  As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, my childhood friend Alex Halderman, now a CS professor at the University of Michigan, has been at the forefront of demonstrating the security problems with electronic voting machines, and advocating for paper trails.  Alex and his colleagues have actually succeeded in influencing how elections are conducted in many states—but not in all of them.  If you want to learn more, check out an in-depth profile of Alex in the latest issue of Playboy.  (There’s no longer nudity in Playboy, so you can even read the thing at work…)

Now On To SCIENCE

As some of you probably saw, Mohammad Bavarian, Giulio Gueltrini, and I put out a new paper about computability theory in a universe with closed timelike curves.  This complements my and John Watrous’s earlier work about complexity theory in a CTC universe, where we showed that finding a fixed-point of a bounded superoperator is a PSPACE-complete problem.  In the new work, we show that finding a fixed-point of an unbounded superoperator has the same difficulty as the halting problem.

Some of you will also have seen that folks from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)—Scott Garrabrant, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, Andrew Critch, Nate Soares, and Jessica Taylor—recently put out a major 130-page paper entitled “Logical Induction”.  (See also their blog announcement.)  This paper takes direct aim at a question that’s come up repeatedly in the comments section of this blog: namely, how can we sensibly assign probabilities to mathematical statements, such as “the 1010^1000th decimal digit of π is a 3″?  The paper proposes an essentially economic framework for that question, involving a marketplace for “mathematical truth futures,” in which new mathematical truths get revealed one by one, and one doesn’t want any polynomial-time traders to be able to make an infinite amount of money by finding patterns in the truths that the prices haven’t already factored in.  I won’t be able to do justice to the work in this paragraph (or even come close), but I hope this sophisticated paper gets the attention it deserves from mathematicians, logicians, CS theorists, AI people, economists, and anyone else who’s ever wondered how a “Bayesian” could sleep at night after betting on (say) the truth or falsehood of Goldbach’s Conjecture.  Feel free to discuss in the comments section.

My PhD student Adam Bouland and former visiting student Lijie Chen, along with Dhiraj Holden, Justin Thaler, and Prashant Vasudevan, have put out a new paper that achieves an oracle separation between the complexity classes SZK and PP (among many other things)—thereby substantially generalizing my quantum lower bound for the collision problem, and solving an open problem that I’d thought about without success since 2002.  Huge relativized congratulations to them!

A new paper by my PhD student Shalev Ben-David and Or Sattath, about using ideas from quantum money to create signed quantum tokens, has been making the rounds on social media.  Why?  Read the abstract and see for yourself!  (My only “contribution” was to tell them not to change a word.)

Several people wrote in to tell me about a recent paper by Henry Lin and Max Tegmark, which tries to use physics analogies and intuitions to explain why deep learning works as well as it does.  To my inexpert eyes, the paper seemed to contain a lot of standard insights from computational learning theory (for example, the need to exploit symmetries and regularities in the world to get polynomial-size representations), but expressed in a different language.  What confused me most was the paper’s claim to prove “no-flattening theorems” showing the necessity of large-depth neural networks—since in the sense I would mean, such a theorem couldn’t possibly be proved without a major breakthrough in computational complexity (e.g., separating the levels of the class TC0). Again, anyone who understands what’s going on is welcome to share in the comments section.

Sevag Gharibian asked me to advertise that the Call for Papers for the 2017 Conference on Computational Complexity, to be held July 6-9 in Riga, Latvia, is now up.

## The No-Cloning Theorem and the Human Condition: My After-Dinner Talk at QCRYPT

September 19th, 2016

The following are the after-dinner remarks that I delivered at QCRYPT’2016, the premier quantum cryptography conference, on Thursday Sep. 15 in Washington DC.  You could compare to my after-dinner remarks at QIP’2006 to see how much I’ve “”matured”” since then. Thanks so much to Yi-Kai Liu and the other organizers for inviting me and for putting on a really fantastic conference.

It’s wonderful to be here at QCRYPT among so many friends—this is the first significant conference I’ve attended since I moved from MIT to Texas. I do, however, need to register a complaint with the organizers, which is: why wasn’t I allowed to bring my concealed firearm to the conference? You know, down in Texas, we don’t look too kindly on you academic elitists in Washington DC telling us what to do, who we can and can’t shoot and so forth. Don’t mess with Texas! As you might’ve heard, many of us Texans even support a big, beautiful, physical wall being built along our border with Mexico. Personally, though, I don’t think the wall proposal goes far enough. Forget about illegal immigration and smuggling: I don’t even want Americans and Mexicans to be able to win the CHSH game with probability exceeding 3/4. Do any of you know what kind of wall could prevent that? Maybe a metaphysical wall.

OK, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. When Yi-Kai asked me to give an after-dinner talk, I wasn’t sure whether to try to say something actually relevant to quantum cryptography or just make jokes. So I’ll do something in between: I’ll tell you about research directions in quantum cryptography that are also jokes.

The subject of this talk is a deep theorem that stands as one of the crowning achievements of our field. I refer, of course, to the No-Cloning Theorem. Almost everything we’re talking about at this conference, from QKD onwards, is based in some way on quantum states being unclonable. If you read Stephen Wiesner’s paper from 1968, which founded quantum cryptography, the No-Cloning Theorem already played a central role—although Wiesner didn’t call it that. By the way, here’s my #1 piece of research advice to the students in the audience: if you want to become immortal, just find some fact that everyone already knows and give it a name!

I’d like to pose the question: why should our universe be governed by physical laws that make the No-Cloning Theorem true? I mean, it’s possible that there’s some other reason for our universe to be quantum-mechanical, and No-Cloning is just a byproduct of that. No-Cloning would then be like the armpit of quantum mechanics: not there because it does anything useful, but just because there’s gotta be something under your arms.

OK, but No-Cloning feels really fundamental. One of my early memories is when I was 5 years old or so, and utterly transfixed by my dad’s home fax machine, one of those crappy 1980s fax machines with wax paper. I kept thinking about it: is it really true that a piece of paper gets transmaterialized, sent through a wire, and reconstituted at the other location? Could I have been that wrong about how the universe works? Until finally I got it—and once you get it, it’s hard even to recapture your original confusion, because it becomes so obvious that the world is made not of stuff but of copyable bits of information. “Information wants to be free!”

The No-Cloning Theorem represents nothing less than a partial return to the view of the world that I had before I was five. It says that quantum information doesn’t want to be free: it wants to be private. There is, it turns out, a kind of information that’s tied to a particular place, or set of places. It can be moved around, or even teleported, but it can’t be copied the way a fax machine copies bits.

So I think it’s worth at least entertaining the possibility that we don’t have No-Cloning because of quantum mechanics; we have quantum mechanics because of No-Cloning—or because quantum mechanics is the simplest, most elegant theory that has unclonability as a core principle. But if so, that just pushes the question back to: why should unclonability be a core principle of physics?

Quantum Key Distribution

A first suggestion about this question came from Gilles Brassard, who’s here. Years ago, I attended a talk by Gilles in which he speculated that the laws of quantum mechanics are what they are because Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has to be possible, while bit commitment has to be impossible. If true, that would be awesome for the people at this conference. It would mean that, far from being this exotic competitor to RSA and Diffie-Hellman that’s distance-limited and bandwidth-limited and has a tiny market share right now, QKD would be the entire reason why the universe is as it is! Or maybe what this really amounts to is an appeal to the Anthropic Principle. Like, if QKD hadn’t been possible, then we wouldn’t be here at QCRYPT to talk about it.

Quantum Money

But maybe we should search more broadly for the reasons why our laws of physics satisfy a No-Cloning Theorem. Wiesner’s paper sort of hinted at QKD, but the main thing it had was a scheme for unforgeable quantum money. This is one of the most direct uses imaginable for the No-Cloning Theorem: to store economic value in something that it’s physically impossible to copy. So maybe that’s the reason for No-Cloning: because God wanted us to have e-commerce, and didn’t want us to have to bother with blockchains (and certainly not with credit card numbers).

The central difficulty with quantum money is: how do you authenticate a bill as genuine? (OK, fine, there’s also the dificulty of how to keep a bill coherent in your wallet for more than a microsecond or whatever. But we’ll leave that for the engineers.)

In Wiesner’s original scheme, he solved the authentication problem by saying that, whenever you want to verify a quantum bill, you bring it back to the bank that printed it. The bank then looks up the bill’s classical serial number in a giant database, which tells the bank in which basis to measure each of the bill’s qubits.

With this system, you can actually get information-theoretic security against counterfeiting. OK, but the fact that you have to bring a bill to the bank to be verified negates much of the advantage of quantum money in the first place. If you’re going to keep involving a bank, then why not just use a credit card?

That’s why over the past decade, some of us have been working on public-key quantum money: that is, quantum money that anyone can verify. For this kind of quantum money, it’s easy to see that the No-Cloning Theorem is no longer enough: you also need some cryptographic assumption. But OK, we can consider that. In recent years, we’ve achieved glory by proposing a huge variety of public-key quantum money schemes—and we’ve achieved even greater glory by breaking almost all of them!

After a while, there were basically two schemes left standing: one based on knot theory by Ed Farhi, Peter Shor, et al. That one has been proven to be secure under the assumption that it can’t be broken. The second scheme, which Paul Christiano and I proposed in 2012, is based on hidden subspaces encoded by multivariate polynomials. For our scheme, Paul and I were able to do better than Farhi et al.: we gave a security reduction. That is, we proved that our quantum money scheme is secure, unless there’s a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to find hidden subspaces encoded by low-degree multivariate polynomials (yadda yadda, you can look up the details) with much greater success probability than we thought possible.

Today, the situation is that my and Paul’s security proof remains completely valid, but meanwhile, our money is completely insecure! Our reduction means the opposite of what we thought it did. There is a break of our quantum money scheme, and as a consequence, there’s also a quantum algorithm to find large subspaces hidden by low-degree polynomials with much better success probability than we’d thought. What happened was that first, some French algebraic cryptanalysts—Faugere, Pena, I can’t pronounce their names—used Gröbner bases to break the noiseless version of scheme, in classical polynomial time. So I thought, phew! At least I had acceded when Paul insisted that we also include a noisy version of the scheme. But later, Paul noticed that there’s a quantum reduction from the problem of breaking our noisy scheme to the problem of breaking the noiseless one, so the former is broken as well.

I’m choosing to spin this positively: “we used quantum money to discover a striking new quantum algorithm for finding subspaces hidden by low-degree polynomials. Err, yes, that’s exactly what we did.”

But, bottom line, until we manage to invent a better public-key quantum money scheme, or otherwise sort this out, I don’t think we’re entitled to claim that God put unclonability into our universe in order for quantum money to be possible.

Copy-Protected Quantum Software

So if not money, then what about its cousin, copy-protected software—could that be why No-Cloning holds? By copy-protected quantum software, I just mean a quantum state that, if you feed it into your quantum computer, lets you evaluate some Boolean function on any input of your choice, but that doesn’t let you efficiently prepare more states that let the same function be evaluated. I think this is important as one of the preeminent evil applications of quantum information. Why should nuclear physicists and genetic engineers get a monopoly on the evil stuff?

OK, but is copy-protected quantum software even possible? The first worry you might have is that, yeah, maybe it’s possible, but then every time you wanted to run the quantum program, you’d have to make a measurement that destroyed it. So then you’d have to go back and buy a new copy of the program for the next run, and so on. Of course, to the software company, this would presumably be a feature rather than a bug!

But as it turns out, there’s a fact many of you know—sometimes called the “Gentle Measurement Lemma,” other times the “Almost As Good As New Lemma”—which says that, as long as the outcome of your measurement on a quantum state could be predicted almost with certainty given knowledge of the state, the measurement can be implemented in such a way that it hardly damages the state at all. This tells us that, if quantum money, copy-protected quantum software, and the other things we’re talking about are possible at all, then they can also be made reusable. I summarize the principle as: “if rockets, then space shuttles.”

Much like with quantum money, one can show that, relative to a suitable oracle, it’s possible to quantumly copy-protect any efficiently computable function—or rather, any function that’s hard to learn from its input/output behavior. Indeed, the implementation can be not only copy-protected but also obfuscated, so that the user learns nothing besides the input/output behavior. As Bill Fefferman pointed out in his talk this morning, the No-Cloning Theorem lets us bypass Barak et al.’s famous result on the impossibility of obfuscation, because their impossibility proof assumed the ability to copy the obfuscated program.

Of course, what we really care about is whether quantum copy-protection is possible in the real world, with no oracle. I was able to give candidate implementations of quantum copy-protection for extremely special functions, like one that just checks the validity of a password. In the general case—that is, for arbitrary programs—Paul Christiano has a beautiful proposal for how to do it, which builds on our hidden-subspace money scheme. Unfortunately, since our money scheme is currently in the shop being repaired, it’s probably premature to think about the security of the much more complicated copy-protection scheme! But these are wonderful open problems, and I encourage any of you to come and scoop us. Once we know whether uncopyable quantum software is possible at all, we could then debate whether it’s the “reason” for our universe to have unclonability as a core principle.

Along the same lines, I can’t resist mentioning some favorite research directions, which some enterprising student here could totally turn into a talk at next year’s QCRYPT.

Firstly, what can we say about clonable versus unclonable quantum proofs—that is, QMA witness states? In other words: for which problems in QMA can we ensure that there’s an accepting witness that lets you efficiently create as many additional accepting witnesses as you want? (I mean, besides the QCMA problems, the ones that have short classical witnesses?) For which problems in QMA can we ensure that there’s an accepting witness that doesn’t let you efficiently create any additional accepting witnesses? I do have a few observations about these questions—ask me if you’re interested—but on the whole, I believe almost anything one can ask about them remains open.

Admittedly, it’s not clear how much use an unclonable proof would be. Like, imagine a quantum state that encoded a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, and which you would keep in your bedroom, in a glass orb on your nightstand or something. And whenever you felt your doubts about the Riemann Hypothesis resurfacing, you’d take the state out of its orb and measure it again to reassure yourself of RH’s truth. You’d be like, “my preciousssss!” And no one else could copy your state and thereby gain the same Riemann-faith-restoring powers that you had. I dunno, I probably won’t hawk this application in a DARPA grant.

Similarly, one can ask about clonable versus unclonable quantum advice states—that is, initial states that are given to you to boost your computational power beyond that of an ordinary quantum computer. And that’s also a fascinating open problem.

OK, but maybe none of this quite gets at why our universe has unclonability. And this is an after-dinner talk, so do you want me to get to the really crazy stuff? Yes?

OK! What if unclonability is our universe’s way around the paradoxes of self-reference, like the unsolvability of the halting problem and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem? Allow me to explain what I mean.

In kindergarten or wherever, we all learn Turing’s proof that there’s no computer program to solve the halting problem. But what isn’t usually stressed is that that proof actually does more than advertised. If someone hands you a program that they claim solves the halting problem, Turing doesn’t merely tell you that that person is wrong—rather, he shows you exactly how to expose the person as a jackass, by constructing an example input on which their program fails. All you do is, you take their claimed halt-decider, modify it in some simple way, and then feed the result back to the halt-decider as input. You thereby create a situation where, if your program halts given its own code as input, then it must run forever, and if it runs forever then it halts. “WHOOOOSH!” [head-exploding gesture]

OK, but now imagine that the program someone hands you, which they claim solves the halting problem, is a quantum program. That is, it’s a quantum state, which you measure in some basis depending on the program you’re interested in, in order to decide whether that program halts. Well, the truth is, this quantum program still can’t work to solve the halting problem. After all, there’s some classical program that simulates the quantum one, albeit less efficiently, and we already know that the classical program can’t work.

But now consider the question: how would you actually produce an example input on which this quantum program failed to solve the halting problem? Like, suppose the program worked on every input you tried. Then ultimately, to produce a counterexample, you might need to follow Turing’s proof and make a copy of the claimed quantum halt-decider. But then, of course, you’d run up against the No-Cloning Theorem!

So we seem to arrive at the conclusion that, while of course there’s no quantum program to solve the halting problem, there might be a quantum program for which no one could explicitly refute that it solved the halting problem, by giving a counterexample.

I was pretty excited about this observation for a day or two, until I noticed the following. Let’s suppose your quantum program that allegedly solves the halting problem has n qubits. Then it’s possible to prove that the program can’t possibly be used to compute more than, say, 2n bits of Chaitin’s constant Ω, which is the probability that a random program halts. OK, but if we had an actual oracle for the halting problem, we could use it to compute as many bits of Ω as we wanted. So, suppose I treated my quantum program as if it were an oracle for the halting problem, and I used it to compute the first 2n bits of Ω. Then I would know that, assuming the truth of quantum mechanics, the program must have made a mistake somewhere. There would still be something weird, which is that I wouldn’t know on which input my program had made an error—I would just know that it must’ve erred somewhere! With a bit of cleverness, one can narrow things down to two inputs, such that the quantum halt-decider must have erred on at least one of them. But I don’t know whether it’s possible to go further, and concentrate the wrongness on a single query.

We can play a similar game with other famous applications of self-reference. For example, suppose we use a quantum state to encode a system of axioms. Then that system of axioms will still be subject to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which I guess I believe despite the umlaut). If it’s consistent, it won’t be able to prove all the true statements of arithmetic. But we might never be able to produce an explicit example of a true statement that the axioms don’t prove. To do so we’d have to clone the state encoding the axioms and thereby violate No-Cloning.

Personal Identity

But since I’m a bit drunk, I should confess that all this stuff about Gödel and self-reference is just a warmup to what I really wanted to talk about, which is whether the No-Cloning Theorem might have anything to do with the mysteries of personal identity and “free will.” I first encountered this idea in Roger Penrose’s book, The Emperor’s New Mind. But I want to stress that I’m not talking here about the possibility that the brain is a quantum computer—much less about the possibility that it’s a quantum-gravitational hypercomputer that uses microtubules to solve the halting problem! I might be drunk, but I’m not that drunk. I also think that the Penrose-Lucas argument, based on Gödel’s Theorem, for why the brain has to work that way is fundamentally flawed.

But here I’m talking about something different. See, I have a lot of friends in the Singularity / Friendly AI movement. And I talk to them whenever I pass through the Bay Area, which is where they congregate. And many of them express great confidence that before too long—maybe in 20 or 30 years, maybe in 100 years—we’ll be able to upload ourselves to computers and live forever on the Internet (as opposed to just living 70% of our lives on the Internet, like we do today).

This would have lots of advantages. For example, any time you were about to do something dangerous, you’d just make a backup copy of yourself first. If you were struggling with a conference deadline, you’d spawn 100 temporary copies of yourself. If you wanted to visit Mars or Jupiter, you’d just email yourself there. If Trump became president, you’d not run yourself for 8 years (or maybe 80 or 800 years). And so on.

Admittedly, some awkward questions arise. For example, let’s say the hardware runs three copies of your code and takes a majority vote, just for error-correcting purposes. Does that bring three copies of you into existence, or only one copy? Or let’s say your code is run homomorphically encrypted, with the only decryption key stored in another galaxy. Does that count? Or you email yourself to Mars. If you want to make sure that you’ll wake up on Mars, is it important that you delete the copy of your code that remains on earth? Does it matter whether anyone runs the code or not? And what exactly counts as “running” it? Or my favorite one: could someone threaten you by saying, “look, I have a copy of your code, and if you don’t do what I say, I’m going to make a thousand copies of it and subject them all to horrible tortures?”

The issue, in all these cases, is that in a world where there could be millions of copies of your code running on different substrates in different locations—or things where it’s not even clear whether they count as a copy or not—we don’t have a principled way to take as input a description of the state of the universe, and then identify where in the universe you are—or even a probability distribution over places where you could be. And yet you seem to need such a way in order to make predictions and decisions.

A few years ago, I wrote this gigantic, post-tenure essay called The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, where I tried to make the point that we don’t know at what level of granularity a brain would need to be simulated in order to duplicate someone’s subjective identity. Maybe you’d only need to go down to the level of neurons and synapses. But if you needed to go all the way down to the molecular level, then the No-Cloning Theorem would immediately throw a wrench into most of the paradoxes of personal identity that we discussed earlier.

For it would mean that there were some microscopic yet essential details about each of us that were fundamentally uncopyable, localized to a particular part of space. We would all, in effect, be quantumly copy-protected software. Each of us would have a core of unpredictability—not merely probabilistic unpredictability, like that of a quantum random number generator, but genuine unpredictability—that an external model of us would fail to capture completely. Of course, by having futuristic nanorobots scan our brains and so forth, it would be possible in principle to make extremely realistic copies of us. But those copies necessarily wouldn’t capture quite everything. And, one can speculate, maybe not enough for your subjective experience to “transfer over.”

Maybe the most striking aspect of this picture is that sure, you could teleport yourself to Mars—but to do so you’d need to use quantum teleportation, and as we all know, quantum teleportation necessarily destroys the original copy of the teleported state. So we’d avert this metaphysical crisis about what to do with the copy that remained on Earth.

Look—I don’t know if any of you are like me, and have ever gotten depressed by reflecting that all of your life experiences, all your joys and sorrows and loves and losses, every itch and flick of your finger, could in principle be encoded by a huge but finite string of bits, and therefore by a single positive integer. (Really? No one else gets depressed about that?) It’s kind of like: given that this integer has existed since before there was a universe, and will continue to exist after the universe has degenerated into a thin gruel of radiation, what’s the point of even going through the motions? You know?

But the No-Cloning Theorem raises the possibility that at least this integer is really your integer. At least it’s something that no one else knows, and no one else could know in principle, even with futuristic brain-scanning technology: you’ll always be able to surprise the world with a new digit. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it were true, then it seems like the sort of thing that would be worthy of elevating unclonability to a fundamental principle of the universe.

So as you enjoy your dinner and dessert at this historic Mayflower Hotel, I ask you to reflect on the following. People can photograph this event, they can video it, they can type up transcripts, in principle they could even record everything that happens down to the millimeter level, and post it on the Internet for posterity. But they’re not gonna get the quantum states. There’s something about this evening, like about every evening, that will vanish forever, so please savor it while it lasts. Thank you.

Update (Sep. 20): Unbeknownst to me, Marc Kaplan did video the event and put it up on YouTube! Click here to watch. Thanks very much to Marc! I hope you enjoy, even though of course, the video can’t precisely clone the experience of having been there.

[Note: The part where I raise my middle finger is an inside joke—one of the speakers during the technical sessions inadvertently did the same while making a point, causing great mirth in the audience.]