## Archive for the ‘Complexity’ Category

### Summer recapitulates life

Tuesday, July 24th, 2018

Last week, I was back at the IAS in Princeton, to speak at a wonderful PITP summer school entitled “From Qubits to Spacetime,” co-organized by Juan Maldacena and Edward Witten. This week, I’ll be back in Waterloo, to visit old and new friends at the Perimeter Institute and Institute for Quantum Computing and give a couple talks.  Then, over the weekend, I’ll be back in Boston to see old friends, colleagues, and students.  After some other miscellaneous travel, I’ll then return to Austin in late August when the semester begins.  The particular sequence IAS → Waterloo → Boston → Austin is of course one that I’ve followed before, over a longer timescale.

Two quick announcements:

First, at the suggestion of reader Sanketh Menda, I’m thinking of holding a Shtetl-Optimized meetup in Waterloo this week.  Please send me an email if you’re interested, and we’ll figure out a time and place that work for everyone.

Second, many of the videos from the IAS summer school are now available, including mine: Part I and Part II.  I cover some basics of complexity theory, the complexity of quantum states and unitary transformations, the Harlow-Hayden argument about the complexity of turning a black hole event horizon into a firewall (with my refinement), and my and Lenny Susskind’s work on circuit complexity, wormholes, and AdS/CFT.  As a special bonus, check out the super-embarrassing goof at the beginning of my first lecture—claiming a mistaken symmetry of conditional entropy and even attributing it to Edward Witten’s lecture!  (But Witten, who I met for the first time on this visit, was kind enough to call my talk “lots of fun” anyway, and give me other positive comments, which I should put on my CV or something.)

Addendum: Many of the PITP videos are well worth watching!  As one example, I found Witten’s talks to be shockingly accessible.  I’d been to a previous talk of his involving Khovanov homology, but beyond the first few minutes, it went so far over my head that I couldn’t tell you how it was for its intended audience.  I’d also been to a popular talk of Witten’s on string theory, but that’s something he could do with only 3 awake brain cells.  In these talks, by contrast, Witten proves some basic inequalities of classical and quantum information theory, then proves the Reeh-Schlieder Theorem of quantum field theory and the Hawking and Penrose singularity theorems of GR, and finally uses quantum information theory to prove positive energy conditions from quantum field theory that are often needed to make statements about GR.

### Customers who liked this quantum recommendation engine might also like its dequantization

Thursday, July 12th, 2018

I’m in Boulder, CO right now for the wonderful Boulder summer school on quantum information, where I’ll be lecturing today and tomorrow on introductory quantum algorithms.  But I now face the happy obligation of taking a break from all the lecture-preparing and schmoozing, to blog about a striking new result by a student of mine—a result that will probably make an appearance in my lectures as well.

Yesterday, Ewin Tang—an 18-year-old who just finished a bachelor’s at UT Austin, and who will be starting a PhD in CS at the University of Washington in the fall—posted a preprint entitled A quantum-inspired classical algorithm for recommendation systems. Ewin’s new algorithm solves the following problem, very loosely stated: given m users and n products, and incomplete data about which users like which products, organized into a convenient binary tree data structure; and given also the assumption that the full m×n preference matrix is low-rank (i.e., that there are not too many ways the users vary in their preferences), sample some products that a given user is likely to want to buy.  This is an abstraction of the problem that’s famously faced by Amazon and Netflix, every time they tell you which books or movies you “might enjoy.”  What’s striking about Ewin’s algorithm is that it uses only polylogarithmic time: that is, time polynomial in log(m), log(n), the matrix rank, and the inverses of the relevant error parameters.  Admittedly, the polynomial involves exponents of 33 and 24: so, not exactly “practical”!  But it seems likely to me that the algorithm will run much, much faster in practice than it can be guaranteed to run in theory.  Indeed, if any readers would like to implement the thing and test it out, please let us know in the comments section!

As the title suggests, Ewin’s algorithm was directly inspired by a quantum algorithm for the same problem, which Kerenidis and Prakash (henceforth KP) gave in 2016, and whose claim to fame was that it, too, ran in polylog(m,n) time.  Prior to Ewin’s result, the KP algorithm was arguably the strongest candidate there was for an exponential quantum speedup for a real-world machine learning problem.  The new result thus, I think, significantly changes the landscape of quantum machine learning, by killing off one of its flagship applications.  (Note that whether KP gives a real exponential speedup was one of the main open problems mentioned in John Preskill’s survey on the applications of near-term quantum computers.)  At the same time, Ewin’s result yields a new algorithm that can be run on today’s computers, that could conceivably be useful to those who need to recommend products to customers, and that was only discovered by exploiting intuition that came from quantum computing. So I’d consider this both a defeat and a victory for quantum algorithms research.

This result was the outcome of Ewin’s undergraduate thesis project (!), which I supervised. A year and a half ago, Ewin took my intro quantum information class, whereupon it quickly became clear that I should offer this person an independent project.  So I gave Ewin the problem of proving a poly(m,n) lower bound on the number of queries that any classical randomized algorithm would need to make to the user preference data, in order to generate product recommendations for a given user, in exactly the same setting that KP had studied.  This seemed obvious to me: in their algorithm, KP made essential use of quantum phase estimation, the same primitive used in Shor’s factoring algorithm.  Without phase estimation, you seemed to be stuck doing linear algebra on the full m×n matrix, which of course would take poly(m,n) time.  But KP had left the problem open, I didn’t know how to solve it either, and nailing it down seemed like an obvious challenge, if we wanted to establish the reality of quantum speedups for at least one practical machine learning problem.  (For the difficulties in finding such speedups, see my essay for Nature Physics, much of which is still relevant even though it was written prior to KP.)

Anyway, for a year, Ewin tried and failed to rule out a superfast classical algorithm for the KP problem—eventually, of course, discovering the unexpected reason for the failure!  Throughout this journey, I served as Ewin’s occasional sounding board, but can take no further credit for the result.  Indeed, I admit that I was initially skeptical when Ewin told me that phase estimation did not look essential after all for generating superfast recommendations—that a classical algorithm could get a similar effect by randomly sampling a tiny submatrix of the user preference matrix, and then carefully exploiting a variant of a 2004 result by Frieze, Kannan, and Vempala.  So when I was in Berkeley a few weeks ago for the Simons quantum computing program, I had the idea of flying Ewin over to explain the new result to the experts, including Kerenidis and Prakash themselves.  After four hours of lectures and Q&A, a consensus emerged that the thing looked solid.  Only after that gauntlet did I advise Ewin to put the preprint online.

So what’s next?  Well, one obvious challenge is to bring down the running time of Ewin’s algorithm, and (as I mentioned before) to investigate whether or not it could give a practical benefit today.  A different challenge is to find some other example of a quantum algorithm that solves a real-world machine learning problem with only a polylogarithmic number of queries … one for which the exponential quantum speedup will hopefully be Ewin-proof, ideally even provably so!  The field is now wide open.  It’s possible that my Forrelation problem, which Raz and Tal recently used for their breakthrough oracle separation between BQP and PH, could be an ingredient in such a separation.

Anyway, there’s much more to say about Ewin’s achievement, but I now need to run to lecture about quantum algorithms like Simon’s and Shor’s, which do achieve provable exponential speedups in query complexity!  Please join me in offering hearty congratulations, see Ewin’s nicely-written paper for details, and if you have any questions for me or (better yet) Ewin, feel free to ask in the comments.

Update: On the Hacker News thread, some commenters are lamenting that such a brilliant mind as Ewin’s would spend its time figuring out how to entice consumers to buy even more products that they don’t need. I confess that that’s an angle that hadn’t even occurred to me: I simply thought that it was a beautiful question whether you actually need a quantum computer to sample the rows of a partially-specified low-rank matrix in polylogarithmic time, and if the application to recommendation systems helped to motivate that question, then so much the better. Now, though, I feel compelled to point out that, in addition to the potentially lucrative application to Amazon and Netflix, research on low-rank matrix sampling algorithms might someday find many other, more economically worthless applications as well.

Another Update: For those who are interested, streaming video of my quantum algorithms lectures in Boulder are now available:

You can also see all the other lectures here.

### My Y Combinator podcast

Friday, June 29th, 2018

Here it is, recorded last week at Y Combinator’s office in San Francisco.  For regular readers of this blog, there will be a few things that are new—research projects I’ve been working on this year—and many things that are old.  Hope you enjoy it!  Thanks so much to Craig Cannon of Y Combinator for inviting me.

Associated with the podcast, Hacker News will be doing an AMA with me later today.  I’ll post a link to that when it’s available.  Update: here it is.

I’m at STOC’2018 TheoryFest in Los Angeles right now, where theoretical computer scientists celebrated the 50th anniversary of the conference that in some sense was the birthplace of the P vs. NP problem.  (Two participants in the very first STOC in 1969, Richard Karp and Allan Borodin, were on a panel to share their memories, along with Ronitt Rubinfeld and Avrim Blum, who joined the action in the 1980s.)  There’s been a great program this year—if you’d like to ask me about it, maybe do so in the comments of this post rather than in the AMA.

### The relativized BQP vs. PH problem (1993-2018)

Sunday, June 3rd, 2018

Update (June 4): OK, I think the blog formatting issues are fixed now—thanks so much to Jesse Kipp for his help!

True story.  A couple nights ago, I was sitting in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament building, watching Gilles Brassard and Charles Bennett receive the Wolf Prize in Physics for their foundational contributions to quantum computing and information.  (The other laureates included, among others, Beilinson and Drinfeld in mathematics; the American honeybee researcher Gene Robinson; and Sir Paul McCartney, who did not show up for the ceremony.)

Along with the BB84 quantum cryptography scheme, the discovery of quantum teleportation, and much else, Bennett and Brassard’s seminal work included some of the first quantum oracle results, such as the BBBV Theorem (Bennett, Bernstein, Brassard, Vazirani), which proved the optimality of Grover’s search algorithm, and thus the inability of quantum computers to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time in the black-box setting.  It thereby set the stage for much of my own career.  Of course, the early giants were nice enough to bequeath to us a few problems they weren’t able to solve, such as: is there an oracle relative to which quantum computers can solve some problem outside the entire polynomial hierarchy (PH)?  That particular problem, in fact, had been open from 1993 all the way to the present, resisting sporadic attacks by me and others.

As I sat through the Wolf Prize ceremony — the speeches in Hebrew that I only 20% understood (though with these sorts of speeches, you can sort of fill in the inspirational sayings for yourself); the applause as one laureate after another announced that they were donating their winnings to charity; the ironic spectacle of far-right, ultranationalist Israeli politicians having to sit through a beautiful (and uncensored) choral rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” — I got an email from my friend and colleague Avishay Tal.  Avishay wrote that he and Ran Raz had just posted a paper online giving an oracle separation between BQP and PH, thereby putting to rest that quarter-century-old problem.  So I was faced with a dilemma: do I look up, at the distinguished people from the US, Canada, Japan, and elsewhere winning medals in Israel, or down at my phone, at the bombshell paper by two Israelis now living in the US?

For those tuning in from home, BQP, or Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial Time, is the class of decision problems efficiently solvable by a quantum computer.  PH, or the Polynomial Hierarchy, is a generalization of NP to allow multiple quantifiers (e.g., does there exist a setting of these variables such that for every setting of those variables, this Boolean formula is satisfied?).  These are two of the most fundamental complexity classes, which is all the motivation one should need for wondering whether the former is contained in the latter.  If additional motivation is needed, though, we’re effectively asking: could quantum computers still solve problems that were classically hard, even in a hypothetical world where P=NP (and hence P=PH also)?  If so, the problems in question could not be any of the famous ones like factoring or discrete logarithms; they’d need to be stranger problems, for which a classical computer couldn’t even recognize a solution efficiently, let alone finding it.

And just so we’re on the same page: if BQP ⊆ PH, then one could hope for a straight-up proof of the containment, but if BQP ⊄ PH, then there’s no way to prove such a thing unconditionally, without also proving (at a minimum) that P ≠ PSPACE.  In the latter case, the best we can hope is to provide evidence for a non-containment—for example, by showing that BQP ⊄ PH relative to a suitable oracle.  What’s noteworthy here is that even the latter, limited goal remained elusive for decades.

In 1993, Bernstein and Vazirani defined an oracle problem called Recursive Fourier Sampling (RFS), and proved it was in BQP but not in BPP (Bounded-Error Probabilistic Polynomial-Time).  One can also show without too much trouble that RFS is not in NP or MA, though one gets stuck trying to put it outside AM.  Bernstein and Vazirani conjectured—at least verbally, I don’t think in writing—that RFS wasn’t even in the polynomial hierarchy.  In 2003, I did some work on Recursive Fourier Sampling, but was unable to find a version that I could prove was outside PH.

Maybe this is a good place to explain that, by a fundamental connection made in the 1980s, proving that oracle problems are outside the polynomial hierarchy is equivalent to proving lower bounds on the sizes of AC0 circuits—or more precisely, constant-depth Boolean circuits with unbounded fan-in and a quasipolynomial number of AND, OR, and NOT gates.  And proving lower bounds on the sizes of AC0 circuits is (just) within complexity theory’s existing abilities—that’s how, for example, Furst-Saxe-Sipser, Ajtai, and Yao managed to show that PH ≠ PSPACE relative to a suitable oracle (indeed, even a random oracle with probability 1).  Alas, from a lower bounds standpoint, Recursive Fourier Sampling is a horrendously complicated problem, and none of the existing techniques seemed to work for it.  And that wasn’t even the only problem: even if one somehow succeeded, the separation that one could hope for from RFS was only quasipolynomial (n versus nlog n), rather than exponential.

Ten years ago, as I floated in a swimming pool in Cambridge, MA, it occurred to me that RFS was probably the wrong way to go.  If you just wanted an oracle separation between BQP and PH, you should focus on a different kind of problem—something like what I’d later call Forrelation.  The Forrelation problem asks: given black-box access to two Boolean functions f,g:{0,1}n→{0,1}, are f and g random and independent, or are they random individually but with each one close to the Boolean Fourier transform of the other one?  It’s easy to give a quantum algorithm to solve Forrelation, even with only 1 query.  But the quantum algorithm really seems to require querying all the f- and g-inputs in superposition, to produce an amplitude that’s a global sum of f(x)g(y) terms with massive cancellations in it.  It’s not clear how we’d reproduce this behavior even with the full power of the polynomial hierarchy.  To be clear: to answer the question, it would suffice to show that no AC0 circuit with exp(poly(n)) gates could distinguish a “Forrelated” distribution over (f,g) pairs from the uniform distribution.

Using a related problem, I managed to show that, relative to a suitable oracle—in fact, even a random oracle—the relational version of BQP (that is, the version where we allow problems with many valid outputs) is not contained in the relational version of PH.  I also showed that a lower bound for Forrelation itself, and hence an oracle separation between the “original,” decision versions of BQP and PH, would follow from something that I called the “Generalized Linial-Nisan Conjecture.”  This conjecture talked about the inability of AC0 circuits to distinguish the uniform distribution from distributions that “looked close to uniform locally.”  My banging the drum about this, I’m happy to say, initiated a sequence of events that culminated in Mark Braverman’s breakthrough proof of the original Linial-Nisan Conjecture.  But alas, I later discovered that my generalized version is false.  This meant that different circuit lower bound techniques, ones more tailored to problems like Forrelation, would be needed to go the distance.

I never reached the promised land.  But my consolation prize is that Avishay and Ran have now done so, by taking Forrelation as their jumping-off point but then going in directions that I’d never considered.

As a first step, Avishay and Ran modify the Forrelation problem so that, in the “yes” case, the correlation between f and the Fourier transform of g is much weaker (though still detectable using a quantum algorithm that makes nO(1) queries to f and g).  This seems like an inconsequential change—sure, you can do that, but what does it buy you?—but it turns out to be crucial for their analysis.  Ultimately, this change lets them show that, when we write down a polynomial that expresses an AC0 circuit’s bias in detecting the forrelation between f and g, all the “higher-order contributions”—those involving a product of k terms of the form f(x) or g(y), for some k>2—get exponentially damped as a function of k, so that only the k=2 contributions still matter.

There are a few additional ideas that Raz and Tal need to finish the job.  First, they relax the Boolean functions f and g to real-valued, Gaussian-distributed functions—very similar to what Andris Ambainis and I did when we proved a nearly-tight randomized lower bound for Forrelation, except that they also need to truncate f and g so they take values in [-1,1]; they then prove that a multilinear polynomial has no way to distinguish their real-valued functions from the original Boolean ones.  Second, they exploit recent results of Tal about the Fourier spectra of AC0 functions.  Third, they exploit recent work of Chattopadhyay et al. on pseudorandom generators from random walks (Chattopadhyay, incidentally, recently finished his PhD at UT Austin).  A crucial idea turns out to be to think of the values of f(x) and g(y), in a real-valued Forrelation instance, as sums of huge numbers of independent random contributions.  Formally, this changes nothing: you end up with exactly the same Gaussian distributions that you had before.  Conceptually, though, you can look at how each tiny contribution changes the distinguishing bias, conditioned on the sum of all the previous contributions; and this leads to the suppression of higher-order terms that we talked about before, with the higher-order terms going to zero as the step size does.

Stepping back from the details, though, let me talk about a central conceptual barrier—one that I know from an email exchange with Avishay was on his and Ran’s minds, even though they never discuss it explicitly in their paper.  In my 2009 paper, I identified what I argued was the main reason why no existing technique was able to prove an oracle separation between BQP and PH.  The reason was this: the existing techniques, based on the Switching Lemma and so forth, involved arguing (often implicitly) that

1. any AC0 circuit can be approximated by a low-degree real polynomial, but
2. the function that we’re trying to compute can’t be approximated by a low-degree real polynomial.

Linial, Mansour, and Nisan made this fully explicit in the context of their learning algorithm for AC0.  And this is all well and good if, for example, we’re trying to prove the n-bit PARITY function is not in AC0, since PARITY is famously inapproximable by any polynomial of sublinear degree.  But what if we’re trying to separate BQP from PH?  In that case, we need to deal with the fundamental observation of Beals et al. 1998: that any function with a fast quantum algorithm, by virtue of having a fast quantum algorithm, is approximable by a low-degree real polynomial!  Approximability by low-degree polynomials giveth with the one hand and taketh away with the other.

To be sure, I pointed out that this barrier wasn’t necessarily insuperable.  For the precise meaning of “approximable by low-degree polynomials” that follows from a function’s being in BQP, might be different from the meaning that’s used to put the function outside of PH.  As one illustration, Razborov and Smolensky’s AC0 lower bound method relates having a small constant-depth circuit to being approximable by low-degree polynomials over finite fields, which is different from being approximable by low-degree polynomials over the reals.  But this didn’t mean I knew an actual way around the barrier: I had no idea how to prove that Forrelation wasn’t approximable by low-degree polynomials over finite fields either.

So then how do Raz and Tal get around the barrier?  Apparently, by exploiting the fact that Tal’s recent results imply much more than just that AC0 functions are approximable by low-degree real polynomials.  Rather, they imply approximability by low-degree real polynomials with bounded L1 norms (i.e., sums of absolute values) of their coefficients.  And crucially, these norm bounds even apply to the degree-2 part of a polynomial—showing that, even all the way down there, the polynomial can’t be “spread around,” with equal weight on all its coefficients.  But being “spread around” is exactly how the true polynomial for Forrelation—the one that you derive from the quantum algorithm—works.  The polynomial looks like this:

$$p(f,g) = \frac{1}{2^{3n/2}} \sum_{x,y \in \left\{0,1\right\}^n} (-1)^{x \cdot y} f(x) g(y).$$

This still isn’t enough for Raz and Tal to conclude that Forrelation itself is not in AC0: after all, the higher-degree terms in the polynomial might somehow compensate for the failures of the lower-degree terms.  But this difference between the two different kinds of low-degree polynomial—the “thin” kind that you get from AC0 circuits, and the “thick” kind that you get from quantum algorithms—gives them an opening that they’re able to combine with the other ideas mentioned above, at least for their noisier version of the Forrelation problem.

This difference between “thin” and “thick” polynomials is closely related to, though not identical with, a second difference, which is that any AC0 circuit needs to compute some total Boolean function, whereas a quantum algorithm is allowed to be indecisive on many inputs, accepting them with a probability that’s close neither to 0 nor to 1.  Tal used the fact that an AC0 circuit computes a total Boolean function, in his argument showing that it gives rise to a “thin” low-degree polynomial.  His argument also implies that no low-degree polynomial that’s “thick,” like the above quantum-algorithm-derived polynomial for Forrelation, can possibly represent a total Boolean function: it must be indecisive on many inputs.

The boundedness of the L1 norm of the coefficients is related to a different condition on low-degree polynomials, which I called the “low-fat condition” in my Counterexample to the Generalized Linial-Nisan Conjecture paper.  However, the whole point of that paper was that the low-fat condition turns out not to work, in the sense that there exist depth-three AC0 circuits that are not approximable by any low-degree polynomials satisfying the condition.  Raz and Tal’s L1 boundedness condition, besides being simpler, also has the considerable advantage that it works.

As Lance Fortnow writes, in his blog post about this achievment, an obvious next step would be to give an oracle relative to which P=NP but P≠BQP.  I expect that this can be done.  Another task is to show that my original Forrelation problem is not in PH—or more generally, to broaden the class of problems that can be handled using Raz and Tal’s methods.  And then there’s one of my personal favorite problems, which seems closely related to BQP vs. PH even though it’s formally incomparable: give an oracle relative to which a quantum computer can’t always prove its answer to a completely classical skeptic via an interactive protocol.

Since (despite my journalist moratorium) a journalist already emailed to ask me about the practical implications of the BQP vs. PH breakthrough—for example, for the ~70-qubit quantum computers that Google and others hope to build in the near future—let me take the opportunity to say that, as far as I can see, there aren’t any.  This is partly because Forrelation is an oracle problem, one that we don’t really know how to instantiate explicitly (in the sense, for example, that factoring and discrete logarithm instantiate Shor’s period-finding algorithm).  And it’s partly because, even if you did want to run the quantum algorithm for Forrelation (or for Raz and Tal’s noisy Forrelation) on a near-term quantum computer, you could easily do that sans the knowledge that the problem sits outside the polynomial hierarchy.

Still, as Avi Wigderson never tires of reminding people, theoretical computer science is richly interconnected, and things can turn up in surprising places.  To take a relevant example: Forrelation, which I introduced for the purely theoretical purpose of separating BQP from PH (and which Andris Ambainis and I later used for another purely theoretical purpose, to prove a maximal separation between randomized and quantum query complexities), now furnishes one of the main separating examples in the field of quantum machine learning algorithms.  So it’s early to say what implications Avishay and Ran’s achievement might ultimately have.  In any case, huge congratulations to them.

### PDQP/qpoly = ALL

Saturday, May 19th, 2018

I’ve put up a new paper.  Unusually for me these days, it’s a very short and simple one (8 pages)—I should do more like this!  Here’s the abstract:

We show that combining two different hypothetical enhancements to quantum computation—namely, quantum advice and non-collapsing measurements—would let a quantum computer solve any decision problem whatsoever in polynomial time, even though neither enhancement yields extravagant power by itself. This complements a related result due to Raz. The proof uses locally decodable codes.

I welcome discussion in the comments.  The real purpose of this post is simply to fulfill a request by James Gallagher, in the comments of my Robin Hanson post:

The probably last chance for humanity involves science progressing, can you apply your efforts to quantum computers, which is your expertise, and stop wasting many hours of you [sic] time with this [expletive deleted]

Indeed, I just returned to Tel Aviv, for the very tail end of my sabbatical, from a weeklong visit to Google’s quantum computing group in LA.  While we mourned tragedies—multiple members of the quantum computing community lost loved ones in recent weeks—it was great to be among so many friends, and great to talk and think for once about actual progress that’s happening in the world, as opposed to people saying mean things on Twitter.  Skipping over its plans to build a 49-qubit chip, Google is now going straight for 72 qubits.  And we now have some viable things that one can do, or try to do, with such a chip, beyond simply proving quantum supremacy—I’ll say more about that in subsequent posts.

Anyway, besides discussing this progress, the other highlight of my trip was going from LA to Santa Barbara on the back of Google physicist Sergio Boixo’s motorcycle—weaving in and out of rush-hour traffic, the tightness of my grip the only thing preventing me from flying out onto the freeway.  I’m glad to have tried it once, and probably won’t be repeating it.

Update: I posted a new version of the PDQP/qpoly=ALL paper, which includes an observation about communication complexity, and which—inspired by the comments section—clarifies that when I say “all languages,” I really do mean “all languages” (even the halting problem).

### ITCS’2018 and more

Wednesday, December 13th, 2017

My good friend Yael Tauman Kalai asked me to share the following announcement (which is the only part of this post that she’s responsible for):

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to draw your attention to the upcoming ITCS (Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science ) conference, which will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA from January 11-14, 2018, with a welcome reception on January 11, 2018 at the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square.  Note that the conference will run for 4 full days (ThursdaySunday).

The deadline for early registration and hotel block are both December 21, 2017.

ITCS has a long tradition of holding a “graduating bits” event where graduating students and postdocs give a short presentation about their work. If you fit the bill, consider signing up — this is a great chance to showcase your work and it’s just plain fun. Graduating bits will take place on Friday, January 12 at 6:30pm.

In addition, we will have an evening poster session at the Marriott hotel on Thursday, January 11 from 6:30-8pm (co-located with the conference reception).

For details on all this and information on how to sign up, please check out the ITCS website:  https://projects.csail.mit.edu/itcs/

In unrelated news, apologies that my entire website was down for a day! After noticing that my blog was often taking me like two minutes to load (!), I upgraded to a supposedly faster Bluehost plan. Let me know if you notice any difference in performance.

In more unrelated news, congratulations to the people of Alabama for not only rejecting the medieval molester (barely), but—as it happens—electing a far better Senator than the President that the US as a whole was able to produce.

One last update: my cousin Alix Genter—who was previously in the national news (and my blog) for a bridal store’s refusal to sell her a dress for a same-sex wedding—recently started a freelance academic editing business. Alix writes to me:

I work with scholars (including non-native English speakers) who have difficulty writing on diverse projects, from graduate work to professional publications. Although I have more expertise in historical writing and topics within gender/sexuality studies, I am interested in scholarship throughout the humanities and qualitative social sciences.

If you’re interested, you can visit Alix’s website here. She’s my cousin, so I’m not totally unbiased, but I recommend her highly.

OK, one last last update: my friend Dmitri Maslov, at the National Science Foundation, has asked me to share the following.

NSF has recently posted a new Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) inviting proposal submissions under RAISE mechanism, https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18035/nsf18035.jsp.  Interdisciplinarity is a key in this new DCL.  The proposals can be for up to $1,000,000 total. To apply, groups of PIs should contact cognizant Program Directors from at least three of the following NSF divisions/offices: DMR, PHY, CHE, DMS, ECCS, CCF, and OAC, and submit a whitepaper by February 16, 2018. It is a somewhat unusual call for proposals in this respect. I would like the Computer Science community to actively participate in this call, because I believe there may be a lot of value in collaborations breaking the boundaries of the individual disciplines. ### The Karp-Lipton Advice Column Wednesday, November 15th, 2017 Today, Shtetl-Optimized is extremely lucky to have the special guest blogger poly: the ‘adviser’ in the computational complexity class P/poly (P with polynomial-sized advice string), defined by Richard Karp and Richard Lipton in 1982. As an adviser, poly is known for being infinitely wise and benevolent, but also for having a severe limitation: namely, she’s sensitive only to the length of her input, and not to any other information about it. Her name comes from the fact that her advice is polynomial-size, which is the problem that prevents her from simply listing the answers to every possible question in a gigantic lookup table, the way she’d like to. Without further ado, let’s see what advice poly is able to offer her respondents. Dear poly, When my husband and I first started dating, we were going at it like rabbits! Lately, though, he seems to have no interest in sex. That’s not normal for a guy, is it? What can I do to spice things up in the bedroom? Sincerely, Frustrated Wife Dear Frustrated Wife, Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly what your question is. All I was told is that the question was 221 characters long. But here’s something that might help: whenever you’re stuck in a rut, sometimes you can “shake things up” with the use of randomness. So, please accept, free of charge, the following string of 221 random bits: 111010100100010010101111110010111101011010001 000111100101000111111011101110100110000110100 0010010010000010110101100100100111000010110 111001011001111111101110100010000010100111000 0111101111001101001111101000001010110101101 Well, it’s not really “random,” since everyone else with a 221-character question would’ve gotten the exact same string. But it’s random enough for many practical purposes. I hope it helps you somehow … good luck! Sincerely, poly Dear poly, I’m a 29-year-old autistic male: a former software entrepreneur currently worth about$400 million, who now spends his time donating to malaria prevention and women’s rights in the developing world.  My issue is that I’ve never been on a date, or even kissed anyone.  I’m terrified to make an advance.  All I read in the news is an endless litany of male sexual misbehavior: Harvey Weinstein, Louis C. K., Leon Wieseltier, George H. W. Bush, Roy Moore, the current president (!), you name it.  And I’m consumed by the urge not to be a pig like those guys.  Like, obviously I’m no more likely to start stripping or masturbating or something in front of some woman I just met, than I am to morph into a koala bear.  But from reading Slate, Salon, Twitter, my Facebook news feed, and so forth, I’ve gotten the clear sense that there’s nothing I could do that modern social mores would deem appropriate and non-creepy—at least, not a guy like me, who wasn’t lucky enough to be born instinctively understanding these matters.  I’m grateful to society for enabling my success, and have no desire to break any of its written or unwritten rules.  But here I genuinely don’t know what society wants me to do.  I’m writing to you because I remember you from my undergrad CS classes—and you’re the only adviser I ever encountered whose advice could be trusted unconditionally.

Yours truly,
Sensitive Nerd

Dear Sensitive Nerd,

I see your that letter is 1369 characters long.  Based on that, here are a few things I can tell you that might be helpful:

• The Riemann Hypothesis is true.
• ZFC set theory is consistent.
• The polynomial hierarchy is contained in PP.

Write me a 3592-character letter the next time, and I’ll give you an even longer list of true mathematical statements!  (I actually know how to solve the halting problem—no joke!—but am condemned to drip, drip, drip out the solutions, a few per input length.)

But I confess: no sooner did I list these truths than I reflected that they, or even a longer list, might not help much with your problem, whatever it might have been.  It’s even possible to have a problem for which no amount of truth helps in solving it.  So, I dunno: maybe try not worrying so much, and write back to let me know if that helped?  (Not that I expect to understand your reply, or would be able to change any of my advice at this point even if I did.)

Good luck!
–poly

Dear poly,

c34;c’y9v3x

Sincerely,
Unhappy in Unary

Dear Unhappy in Unary,

Finally, someone who writes to me in a language I can understand!  Your question is 11 characters long.  I understand that to be a code expressing that you’re bankrupt, and are filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.  Financial insolvency isn’t easy for anyone.  But here’s some advice: put everything you have into Bitcoin, and sell out a year from now.  Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly when you’re writing to me, but at least at the time my responses were hardwired in, this was some damn good advice.

You’re welcome,
poly

poly’s polynomial-sized advice column is syndicated in newspapers nationwide, and can also be accessed by simply moving your tape head across your advice tape. You’re welcome to comment on this post, but I might respond only to the lengths of the comments, rather than anything else about them. –SA

### Grad students and postdocs and faculty sought

Saturday, October 28th, 2017

I’m eagerly seeking PhD students and postdocs to join our Quantum Information Center at UT Austin, starting in Fall 2018.  We’re open to any theoretical aspects of quantum information, although if you wanted to work with me personally, then areas close to computer science would be the closest fit.  I’m also able to supervise PhD students in physics, but am not directly involved with admissions to the physics department: this is a discussion we would have after you were already admitted to UT.

I, along with my theoretical computer science colleagues at UT Austin, am also open to outstanding students and postdocs in classical complexity theory. My wife, Dana Moshkovitz, tells me that she and David Zuckerman in particular are looking for a postdoc in the areas of pseudorandomness and derandomization (and for PhD students as well).

If you want to apply to the UTCS PhD program, please visit here.  The deadline is December 15.  If you specify that you want to work on quantum computing and information, and/or with me, then I’ll be sure to see your application.  Emailing faculty at this stage doesn’t help; we won’t “estimate your chances” or even look at your qualifications until we can see all the applications together.

If you want to apply for a postdoc with me, here’s what to do:

• Email me introducing yourself (if I don’t already know you), and include your CV, your thesis (if you already have one), and up to 3 representative papers.  Do this even if you already emailed me before.
• Arrange for two recommendation letters to be emailed to me.

Let’s set a deadline for postdoc applications of, I dunno, December 15?

In addition to the above, I’m happy to announce that the UT CS department is looking to hire a new faculty member in quantum computing and information—most likely a junior person.  The UT physics department is also looking to hire quantum information faculty members, with a focus on a senior-level experimentalist right now.  If you’re interested in these opportunities, just email me; I can put you in touch with the relevant people.

All in all, this is shaping up to be the most exciting era for quantum computing and information in Austin since a group of UT students, postdocs, and faculty including David Deutsch, John Wheeler, Wojciech Zurek, Bill Wootters, and Ben Schumacher laid much of the intellectual foundation of the field in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  We hope you’ll join us.  Hook ’em Hadamards!

Unrelated Announcements: Avi Wigderson has released a remarkable 368-page book, Mathematics and Computation, for free on the web.  This document surveys pretty much the entire current scope of theoretical computer science, in a way only Avi, our field’s consummate generalist, could do.  It also sets out Avi’s vision for the future and his sociological thoughts about TCS and its interactions with neighboring fields.  I was a reviewer on the manuscript, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a panoramic view of TCS.

In other news, my UT friend and colleague Adam Klivans, and his student Surbhi Goel, have put out a preprint entitled Learning Depth-Three Neural Networks in Polynomial Time.  (Beware: what the machine learning community calls “depth three,” is what the TCS community would call “depth two.”)  This paper learns real-valued neural networks in the so-called p-concept model of Kearns and Schapire, and thereby evades a 2006 impossibility theorem of Klivans and Sherstov, which showed that efficiently learning depth-2 threshold circuits would require breaking cryptographic assumptions.  More broadly, there’s been a surge of work in the past couple years on explaining the success of deep learning methods (methods whose most recent high-profile victory was, of course, AlphaGo Zero).  I’m really hoping to learn more about this direction during my sabbatical this year—though I’ll try and take care not to become another deep learning zombie, chanting “artificial BRAINSSSS…” with outstretched arms.

### 2^n is exponential, but 2^50 is finite

Sunday, October 22nd, 2017

Unrelated Update (Oct. 23) I still feel bad that there was no time for public questions at my “Theoretically Speaking” talk in Berkeley, and also that the lecture hall was too small to accomodate a large fraction of the people who showed up. So, if you’re someone who came there wanting to ask me something, go ahead and ask in the comments of this post.

During my whirlwind tour of the Bay Area, questions started pouring in about a preprint from a group mostly at IBM Yorktown Heights, entitled Breaking the 49-Qubit Barrier in the Simulation of Quantum Circuits.  In particular, does this paper make a mockery of everything the upcoming quantum supremacy experiments will try to achieve, and all the theorems about them that we’ve proved?

Following my usual practice, let me paste the abstract here, so that we have the authors’ words in front of us, rather than what a friend of a friend said a popular article reported might have been in the paper.

With the current rate of progress in quantum computing technologies, 50-qubit systems will soon become a reality.  To assess, refine and advance the design and control of these devices, one needs a means to test and evaluate their fidelity. This in turn requires the capability of computing ideal quantum state amplitudes for devices of such sizes and larger.  In this study, we present a new approach for this task that significantly extends the boundaries of what can be classically computed.  We demonstrate our method by presenting results obtained from a calculation of the complete set of output amplitudes of a universal random circuit with depth 27 in a 2D lattice of 7 × 7 qubits.  We further present results obtained by calculating an arbitrarily selected slice of 237 amplitudes of a universal random circuit with depth 23 in a 2D lattice of 8×7 qubits.  Such calculations were previously thought to be impossible due to impracticable memory requirements. Using the methods presented in this paper, the above simulations required 4.5 and 3.0 TB of memory, respectively, to store calculations, which is well within the limits of existing classical computers.

This is an excellent paper, which sets a new record for the classical simulation of generic quantum circuits; I congratulate the authors for it.  Now, though, I want you to take a deep breath and repeat after me:

This paper does not undercut the rationale for quantum supremacy experiments.  The truth, ironically, is almost the opposite: it being possible to simulate 49-qubit circuits using a classical computer is a precondition for Google’s planned quantum supremacy experiment, because it’s the only way we know to check such an experiment’s results!  The goal, with sampling-based quantum supremacy, was always to target the “sweet spot,” which we estimated at around 50 qubits, where classical simulation is still possible, but it’s clearly orders of magnitude more expensive than doing the experiment itself.  If you like, the goal is to get as far as you can up the mountain of exponentiality, conditioned on people still being able to see you from the base.  Why?  Because you can.  Because it’s there.  Because it challenges those who think quantum computing will never scale: explain this, punks!  But there’s no point unless you can verify the result.

Related to that, the paper does not refute any prediction I made, by doing anything I claimed was impossible.  On the contrary (if you must know), the paper confirms something that I predicted would be possible.  People said: “40 qubits is the practical limit of what you can simulate, so there’s no point in Google or anyone else doing a supremacy experiment with 49 qubits, since they can never verify the results.”  I would shrug and say something like: “eh, if you can do 40 qubits, then I’m sure you can do 50.  It’s only a thousand times harder!”

So, how does the paper get up to 50 qubits?  A lot of computing power and a lot of clever tricks, one of which (the irony thickens…) came from a paper that I recently coauthored with Lijie Chen: Complexity-Theoretic Foundations of Quantum Supremacy Experiments.  Lijie and I were interested in the question: what’s the best way to simulate a quantum circuit with n qubits and m gates?  We noticed that there’s a time/space tradeoff here: you could just store the entire amplitude vector in memory and update, which would take exp(n) memory but also “only” about exp(n) time.  Or you could compute the amplitudes you cared about via Feynman sums (as in the proof of BQP⊆PSPACE), which takes only linear memory, but exp(m) time.  If you imagine, let’s say, n=50 and m=1000, then exp(n) might be practical if you’re IBM or Google, but exp(m) is certainly not.

So then we raised the question: could one get the best of both worlds?  That is, could one simulate such a quantum circuit using both linear memory and exp(n) time?  And we showed that this is almost possible: we gave an algorithm that uses linear memory and dO(n) time, where d is the circuit depth.  Furthermore, the more memory it has available, the faster our algorithm will run—until, in the limit of exponential memory, it just becomes the “store the whole amplitude vector” algorithm mentioned above.  I’m not sure why this algorithm wasn’t discovered earlier, especially since it basically just amounts to Savitch’s Theorem from complexity theory.  In any case, though, the IBM group used this idea among others to take full advantage of the RAM it had available.

Let me make one final remark: this little episode perfectly illustrates why theoretical computer scientists like to talk about polynomial vs. exponential rather than specific numbers.  If you keep your eyes on the asymptotic fundamentals, rather than every factor of 10 or 1000, then you’re not constantly shocked by events, like a dog turning its head for every passing squirrel.  Before you could simulate 40 qubits, now you can simulate 50.  Maybe with more cleverness you could get to 60 or even 70.  But … dude.  The problem is still exponential time.

We saw the same “SQUIRREL!  SQUIRREL!” reaction with the people who claimed that the wonderful paper by Clifford and Clifford had undercut the rationale for BosonSampling experiments, by showing how to solve the problem in “merely” ~2n time rather than ~mn, where n is the number of photons and m is the number of modes.  Of course, Arkhipov and I had never claimed more than ~2n hardness for the problem, and Clifford and Clifford’s important result had justified our conservatism on that point, but, y’know … SQUIRREL!

More broadly, it seems to me that this dynamic constantly occurs in the applied cryptography world.  OMIGOD a 128-bit hash function has been broken!  Big news!  OMIGOD a new, harder hash function has been designed!  Bigger news!  OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD the new one was broken too!!  All of it fully predictable once you realize that we’re on the shores of an exponentially hard problem, and for some reason, refusing to go far enough out into the sea (i.e., pick large enough security parameters) that none of this back-and-forth would happen.

I apologize, sincerely, if I come off as too testy in this post.  No doubt it’s entirely the fault of a cognitive defect on my end, wherein ten separate people asking me about something get treated by my brain like a single person who still doesn’t get it even after I’ve explained it ten times.

### Because you asked: the Simulation Hypothesis has not been falsified; remains unfalsifiable

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017

By email, by Twitter, even as the world was convulsed by tragedy, the inquiries poured in yesterday about a different topic entirely: Scott, did physicists really just prove that the universe is not a computer simulation—that we can’t be living in the Matrix?

What prompted this was a rash of popular articles like this one (“Researchers claim to have found proof we are NOT living in a simulation”).  The articles were all spurred by a recent paper in Science Advances: Quantized gravitational responses, the sign problem, and quantum complexity, by Zohar Ringel of Hebrew University and Dmitry L. Kovrizhin of Oxford.

I’ll tell you what: before I comment, why don’t I just paste the paper’s abstract here.  I invite you to read it—not the whole paper, just the abstract, but paying special attention to the sentences—and then make up your own mind about whether it supports the interpretation that all the popular articles put on it.

Abstract: It is believed that not all quantum systems can be simulated efficiently using classical computational resources.  This notion is supported by the fact that it is not known how to express the partition function in a sign-free manner in quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations for a large number of important problems.  The answer to the question—whether there is a fundamental obstruction to such a sign-free representation in generic quantum systems—remains unclear.  Focusing on systems with bosonic degrees of freedom, we show that quantized gravitational responses appear as obstructions to local sign-free QMC.  In condensed matter physics settings, these responses, such as thermal Hall conductance, are associated with fractional quantum Hall effects.  We show that similar arguments also hold in the case of spontaneously broken time-reversal (TR) symmetry such as in the chiral phase of a perturbed quantum Kagome antiferromagnet.  The connection between quantized gravitational responses and the sign problem is also manifested in certain vertex models, where TR symmetry is preserved.

For those tuning in from home, the “sign problem” is an issue that arises when, for example, you’re trying to use the clever trick known as Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) to learn about the ground state of a quantum system using a classical computer—but where you needed probabilities, which are real numbers from 0 to 1, your procedure instead spits out numbers some of which are negative, and which you can therefore no longer use to define a sensible sampling process.  (In some sense, it’s no surprise that this would happen when you’re trying to simulate quantum mechanics, which of course is all about generalizing the rules of probability in a way that involves negative and even complex numbers!  The surprise, rather, is that QMC lets you avoid the sign problem as often as it does.)

Anyway, this is all somewhat far from my expertise, but insofar as I understand the paper, it looks like a serious contribution to our understanding of the sign problem, and why local changes of basis can fail to get rid of it when QMC is used to simulate certain bosonic systems.  It will surely interest QMC experts.

OK, but does any of this prove that the universe isn’t a computer simulation, as the popular articles claim (and as the original paper does not)?

It seems to me that, to get from here to there, you’d need to overcome four huge difficulties, any one of which would be fatal by itself, and which are logically independent of each other.

1. As a computer scientist, one thing that leapt out at me, is that Ringel and Kovrizhin’s paper is fundamentally about computational complexity—specifically, about which quantum systems can and can’t be simulated in polynomial time on a classical computer—yet it’s entirely innocent of the language and tools of complexity theory.  There’s no BQP, no QMA, no reduction-based hardness argument anywhere in sight, and no clearly-formulated request for one either.  Instead, everything is phrased in terms of the failure of one specific algorithmic framework (namely QMC)—and within that framework, only “local” transformations of the physical degrees of freedom are considered, not nonlocal ones that could still be accessible to polynomial-time algorithms.  Of course, one does whatever one needs to do to get a result.
To their credit, the authors do seem aware that a language for discussing all possible efficient algorithms exists.  They write, for example, of a “common understanding related to computational complexity classes” that some quantum systems are hard to simulate, and specifically of the existence of systems that support universal quantum computation.  So rather than criticize the authors for this limitation of their work, I view their paper as a welcome invitation for closer collaboration between the quantum complexity theory and quantum Monte Carlo communities, which approach many of the same questions from extremely different angles.  As official ambassador between the two communities, I nominate Matt Hastings.
2. OK, but even if the paper did address computational complexity head-on, about the most it could’ve said is that computer scientists generally believe that BPP≠BQP (i.e., that quantum computers can solve more decision problems in polynomial time than classical probabilistic ones); and that such separations are provable in the query complexity and communication complexity worlds; and that at any rate, quantum computers can solve exact sampling problems that are classically hard unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses (as pointed out in the BosonSampling paper, and independently by Bremner, Jozsa, Shepherd).  Alas, until someone proves P≠PSPACE, there’s no hope for an unconditional proof that quantum computers can’t be efficiently simulated by classical ones.
(Incidentally, the paper comments, “Establishing an obstruction to a classical simulation is a rather ill-defined task.”  I beg to differ: it’s not ill-defined; it’s just ridiculously hard!)
3. OK, but suppose it were proved that BPP≠BQP—and for good measure, suppose it were also experimentally demonstrated that scalable quantum computing is possible in our universe.  Even then, one still wouldn’t by any stretch have ruled out that the universe was a computer simulation!  For as many of the people who emailed me asked themselves (but as the popular articles did not), why not just imagine that the universe is being simulated on a quantum computer?  Like, duh?
4. Finally: even if, for some reason, we disallowed using a quantum computer to simulate the universe, that still wouldn’t rule out the simulation hypothesis.  For why couldn’t God, using Her classical computer, spend a trillion years to simulate one second as subjectively perceived by us?  After all, what is exponential time to She for whom all eternity is but an eyeblink?

Anyway, if it weren’t for all four separate points above, then sure, physicists would have now proved that we don’t live in the Matrix.

I do have a few questions of my own, for anyone who came here looking for my reaction to the ‘news’: did you really need me to tell you all this?  How much of it would you have figured out on your own, just by comparing the headlines of the popular articles to the descriptions (however garbled) of what was actually done?  How obvious does something need to be, before it no longer requires an ‘expert’ to certify it as such?  If I write 500 posts like this one, will the 501st post basically just write itself?