## Archive for the ‘Complexity’ Category

### Research (by others) proceeds apace

Wednesday, January 27th, 2021

At age 39, I already feel more often than not like a washed-up has-been in complexity theory and quantum computing research. It’s not intelligence that I feel like I’ve lost, so much as two other necessary ingredients: burning motivation and time. But all is not lost: I still have students and postdocs to guide and inspire! I still have the people who email me every day—journalists, high-school kids, colleagues—asking this and that! Finally, I still have this blog, with which to talk about all the exciting research that others are doing!

Speaking of blogging about research: I know I ought to do more of it, so let me start right now.

• Last night, Renou et al. posted a striking paper on the arXiv entitled Quantum physics needs complex numbers. One’s immediate reaction to the title might be “well duh … who ever thought it didn’t?” (See this post of mine for a survey of explanations for why quantum mechanics “should have” involved complex numbers.) Renou et al., however, are interested in ruling out a subtler possibility: namely, that our universe is secretly based on a version of quantum mechanics with real amplitudes only, and that it uses extra Hilbert space dimensions that we don’t see in order to simulate complex quantum mechanics. Strictly speaking, such a possibility can never be ruled out, any more than one can rule out the possibility that the universe is a classical computer that simulates quantum mechanics. In the latter case, though, the whole point of Bell’s Theorem is to show that if the universe is secretly classical, then it also needs to be radically nonlocal (relying on faster-than-light communication to coordinate measurement outcomes). Renou et al. claim to show something analogous about real quantum mechanics: there’s an experiment—as it happens, one involving three players and two entangled pairs—for which conventional QM predicts an outcome that can’t be explained using any variant of QM that’s both local and secretly based on real amplitudes. Their experiment seems eminently doable, and I imagine it will be done in short order.
• A bunch of people from PsiQuantum posted a paper on the arXiv introducing “fusion-based quantum computation” (FBQC), a variant of measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) and apparently a new approach to fault-tolerance, which the authors say can handle a ~10% rate of lost photons. PsiQuantum is the large, Palo-Alto-based startup trying to build scalable quantum computers based on photonics. They’ve been notoriously secretive, to the point of not having a website. I’m delighted that they’re sharing details of the sort of thing they hope to build; I hope and expect that the FBQC proposal will be evaluated by people more qualified than me.
• Since this is already on social media: apparently, Marc Lackenby from Oxford will be giving a Zoom talk at UC Davis next week, about a quasipolynomial-time algorithm to decide whether a given knot is the unknot. A preprint doesn’t seem to be available yet, but this is a big deal if correct, on par with Babai’s quasipolynomial-time algorithm for graph isomorphism from four years ago (see this post). I can’t wait to see details! (Not that I’ll understand them well.)

### Chinese BosonSampling experiment: the gloves are off

Wednesday, December 16th, 2020

Two weeks ago, I blogged about the striking claim, by the group headed by Chaoyang Lu and Jianwei Pan at USTC in China, to have achieved quantum supremacy via BosonSampling with 50-70 detected photons. I also did a four-part interview on the subject with Jonathan Tennenbaum at Asia Times, and other interviews elsewhere. None of that stopped some people, who I guess didn’t google, from writing to tell me how disappointed they were by my silence!

The reality, though, is that a lot has happened since the original announcement, so it’s way past time for an update.

I. The Quest to Spoof

Most importantly, other groups almost immediately went to work trying to refute the quantum supremacy claim, by finding some efficient classical algorithm to spoof the reported results. It’s important to understand that this is exactly how the process is supposed to work: as I’ve often stressed, a quantum supremacy claim is credible only if it’s open to the community to refute and if no one can. It’s also important to understand that, for reasons we’ll go into, there’s a decent chance that people will succeed in simulating the new experiment classically, although they haven’t yet. All parties to the discussion agree that the new experiment is, far and away, the closest any BosonSampling experiment has ever gotten to the quantum supremacy regime; the hard part is to figure out if it’s already there.

Part of me feels guilty that, as one of reviewers on the Science paper—albeit, one stressed and harried by kids and covid—it’s now clear that I didn’t exercise the amount of diligence that I could have, in searching for ways to kill the new supremacy claim. But another part of me feels that, with quantum supremacy claims, much like with proposals for new cryptographic codes, vetting can’t be the responsibility of one or two reviewers. Instead, provided the claim is serious—as this one obviously is—the only thing to do is to get the paper out, so that the entire community can then work to knock it down. Communication between authors and skeptics is also a hell of a lot faster when it doesn’t need to go through a journal’s editorial system.

Not surprisingly, one skeptic of the new quantum supremacy claim is Gil Kalai, who (despite Google’s result last year, which Gil still believes must be in error) rejects the entire possibility of quantum supremacy on quasi-metaphysical grounds. But other skeptics are current and former members of the Google team, including Sergio Boixo and John Martinis! And—pause to enjoy the irony—Gil has effectively teamed up with the Google folks on questioning the new claim. Another central figure in the vetting effort—one from whom I’ve learned much of what I know about the relevant issues over the last week—is Dutch quantum optics professor and frequent Shtetl-Optimized commenter Jelmer Renema.

Without further ado, why might the new experiment, impressive though it was, be efficiently simulable classically? A central reason for concern is photon loss: as Chaoyang Lu has now explicitly confirmed (it was implicit in the paper), up to ~70% of the photons get lost on their way through the beamsplitter network, leaving only ~30% to be detected. At least with “Fock state” BosonSampling—i.e., the original kind, the kind with single-photon inputs that Alex Arkhipov and I proposed in 2011—it seems likely to me that such a loss rate would be fatal for quantum supremacy; see for example this 2019 paper by Renema, Shchesnovich, and Garcia-Patron.

Incidentally, if anything’s become clear over the last two weeks, it’s that I, the co-inventor of BosonSampling, am no longer any sort of expert on the subject’s literature!

Anyway, one source of uncertainty regarding the photon loss issue is that, as I said in my last post, the USTC experiment implemented a 2016 variant of BosonSampling called Gaussian BosonSampling (GBS)—and Jelmer tells me that the computational complexity of GBS in the presence of losses hasn’t yet been analyzed in the relevant regime, though there’s been work aiming in that direction. A second source of uncertainty is simply that the classical simulations work in a certain limit—namely, fixing the rate of noise and then letting the numbers of photons and modes go to infinity—but any real experiment has a fixed number of photons and modes (in USTC’s case, they’re ~50 and ~100 respectively). It wouldn’t do to reject USTC’s claim via a theoretical asymptotic argument that would equally well apply to any non-error-corrected quantum supremacy demonstration!

OK, but if an efficient classical simulation of lossy GBS experiments exists, then what is it? How does it work? It turns out that we have a plausible candidate for the answer to that, originating with a 2014 paper by Gil Kalai and Guy Kindler. Given a beamsplitter network, Kalai and Kindler considered an infinite hierarchy of better and better approximations to the BosonSampling distribution for that network. Roughly speaking, at the first level (k=1), one pretends that the photons are just classical distinguishable particles. At the second level (k=2), one correctly models quantum interference involving pairs of photons, but none of the higher-order interference. At the third level (k=3), one correctly models three-photon interference, and so on until k=n (where n is the total number of photons), when one has reproduced the original BosonSampling distribution. At least when k is small, the time needed to spoof outputs at the kth level of the hierarchy should grow like nk. As theoretical computer scientists, Kalai and Kindler didn’t care whether their hierarchy produced any physically realistic kind of noise, but later work, by Shchesnovich, Renema, and others, showed that (as it happens) it does.

In its original paper, the USTC team ruled out the possibility that the first, k=1 level of this hierarchy could explain its experimental results. More recently, in response to inquiries by Sergio, Gil, Jelmer, and others, Chaoyang tells me they’ve ruled out the possibility that the k=2 level can explain their results either. We’re now eagerly awaiting the answer for larger values of k.

Let me add that I owe Gil Kalai the following public mea culpa. While his objections to QC have often struck me as unmotivated and weird, in the case at hand, Gil’s 2014 work with Kindler is clearly helping drive the scientific discussion forward. In other words, at least with BosonSampling, it turns out that Gil put his finger precisely on a key issue. He did exactly what every QC skeptic should do, and what I’ve always implored the skeptics to do.

II. BosonSampling vs. Random Circuit Sampling: A Tale of HOG and CHOG and LXEB

There’s a broader question: why should skeptics of a BosonSampling experiment even have to think about messy details like the rate of photon losses? Why shouldn’t that be solely the experimenters’ job?

To understand what I mean, consider the situation with Random Circuit Sampling, the task Google demonstrated last year with 53 qubits. There, the Google team simply collected the output samples and fed them into a benchmark that they called “Linear Cross-Entropy” (LXEB), closely related to what Lijie Chen and I called “Heavy Output Generation” (HOG) in a 2017 paper. With suitable normalization, an ideal quantum computer would achieve an LXEB score of 2, while classical random guessing would achieve an LXEB score of 1. Crucially, according to a 2019 result by me and Sam Gunn, under a plausible (albeit strong) complexity assumption, no subexponential-time classical spoofing algorithm should be able to achieve an LXEB score that’s even slightly higher than 1. In its experiment, Google reported an LXEB score of about 1.002, with a confidence interval much smaller than 0.002. Hence: quantum supremacy (subject to our computational assumption), with no further need to know anything about the sources of noise in Google’s chip! (More explicitly, Boixo, Smelyansky, and Neven did a calculation in 2017 to show that the Kalai-Kindler type of spoofing strategy definitely isn’t going to work against RCS and Linear XEB, with no computational assumption needed.)

So then why couldn’t the USTC team do something analogous with BosonSampling? Well, they tried to. They defined a measure that they called “HOG,” although it’s different from my and Lijie Chen’s HOG, more similar to a cross-entropy. Following Jelmer, let me call their measure CHOG, where the C could stand for Chinese, Chaoyang’s, or Changed. They calculated the CHOG for their experimental samples, and showed that it exceeds the CHOG that you’d get from the k=1 and k=2 levels of the Kalai-Kindler hierarchy, as well as from various other spoofing strategies, thereby ruling those out as classical explanations for their results.

The trouble is this: unlike with Random Circuit Sampling and LXEB, with BosonSampling and CHOG, we know that there are fast classical algorithms that achieve better scores than the trivial algorithm, the algorithm that just picks samples at random. That follows from Kalai and Kindler’s work, and it even more simply follows from a 2013 paper by me and Arkhipov, entitled “BosonSampling Is Far From Uniform.” Worse yet, with BosonSampling, we currently have no analogue of my 2019 result with Sam Gunn: that is, a result that would tell us (under suitable complexity assumptions) the highest possible CHOG score that we expect any efficient classical algorithm to be able to get. And since we don’t know exactly where that ceiling is, we can’t tell the experimentalists exactly what target they need to surpass in order to claim quantum supremacy. Absent such definitive guidance from us, the experimentalists are left playing whac-a-mole against this possible classical spoofing strategy, and that one, and that one.

This is an issue that I and others were aware of for years, although the new experiment has certainly underscored it. Had I understood just how serious the USTC group was about scaling up BosonSampling, and fast, I might’ve given the issue some more attention!

III. Fock vs. Gaussian BosonSampling

Above, I mentioned another complication in understanding the USTC experiment: namely, their reliance on Gaussian BosonSampling (GBS) rather than Fock BosonSampling (FBS), sometimes also called Aaronson-Arkhipov BosonSampling (AABS). Since I gave this issue short shrift in my previous post, let me make up for it now.

In FBS, the initial state consists of either 0 or 1 photons in each input mode, like so: |1,…,1,0,…,0⟩. We then pass the photons through our beamsplitter network, and measure the number of photons in each output mode. The result is that the amplitude of each possible output configuration can be expressed as the permanent of some n×n matrix, where n is the total number of photons. It was interest in the permanent, which plays a central role in classical computational complexity, that led me and Arkhipov to study BosonSampling in the first place.

The trouble is, preparing initial states like |1,…,1,0,…,0⟩ turns out to be really hard. No one has yet build a source that reliably outputs one and only one photon at exactly a specified time. This led two experimental groups to propose an idea that, in a 2013 post on this blog, I named Scattershot BosonSampling (SBS). In SBS, you get to use the more readily available “Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion” (SPDC) photon sources, which output superpositions over different numbers of photons, of the form $$\sum_{n=0}^{\infty} \alpha_n |n \rangle |n \rangle,$$ where αn decreases exponentially with n. You then measure the left half of each entangled pair, hope to see exactly one photon, and are guaranteed that if you do, then there’s also exactly one photon in the right half. Crucially, one can show that, if Fock BosonSampling is hard to simulate approximately using a classical computer, then the Scattershot kind must be as well.

OK, so what’s Gaussian BosonSampling? It’s simply the generalization of SBS where, instead of SPDC states, our input can be an arbitrary “Gaussian state”: for those in the know, a state that’s exponential in some quadratic polynomial in the creation operators. If there are m modes, then such a state requires ~m2 independent parameters to specify. The quantum optics people have a much easier time creating these Gaussian states than they do creating single-photon Fock states.

While the amplitudes in FBS are given by permanents of matrices (and thus, the probabilities by the absolute squares of permanents), the probabilities in GBS are given by a more complicated matrix function called the Hafnian. Roughly speaking, while the permanent counts the number of perfect matchings in a bipartite graph, the Hafnian counts the number of perfect matchings in an arbitrary graph. The permanent and the Hafnian are both #P-complete. In the USTC paper, they talk about yet another matrix function called the “Torontonian,” which was invented two years ago. I gather that the Torontonian is just the modification of the Hafnian for the situation where you only have “threshold detectors” (which decide whether one or more photons are present in a given mode), rather than “number-resolving detectors” (which count how many photons are present).

If Gaussian BosonSampling includes Scattershot BosonSampling as a special case, and if Scattershot BosonSampling is at least as hard to simulate classically as the original BosonSampling, then you might hope that GBS would also be at least as hard to simulate classically as the original BosonSampling. Alas, this doesn’t follow. Why not? Because for all we know, a random GBS instance might be a lot easier than a random SBS instance. Just because permanents can be expressed using Hafnians, doesn’t mean that a random Hafnian is as hard as a random permanent.

Nevertheless, I think it’s very likely that the sort of analysis Arkhipov and I did back in 2011 could be mirrored in the Gaussian case. I.e., instead of starting with reasonable assumptions about the distribution and hardness of random permanents, and then concluding the classical hardness of approximate BosonSampling, one would start with reasonable assumptions about the distribution and hardness of random Hafnians (or “Torontonians”), and conclude the classical hardness of approximate GBS. But this is theoretical work that remains to be done!

IV. Application to Molecular Vibronic Spectra?

In 2014, Alan Aspuru-Guzik and collaborators put out a paper that made an amazing claim: namely that, contrary to what I and others had said, BosonSampling was not an intrinsically useless model of computation, good only for refuting QC skeptics like Gil Kalai! Instead, they said, a BosonSampling device (specifically, what would later be called a GBS device) could be directly applied to solve a practical problem in quantum chemistry. This is the computation of “molecular vibronic spectra,” also known as “Franck-Condon profiles,” whatever those are.

I never understood nearly enough about chemistry to evaluate this striking proposal, but I was always a bit skeptical of it, for the following reason. Nothing in the proposal seemed to take seriously that BosonSampling is a sampling task! A chemist would typically have some specific numbers that she wants to estimate, of which these “vibronic spectra” seemed to be an example. But while it’s often convenient to estimate physical quantities via Monte Carlo sampling over simulated observations of the physical system you care about, that’s not the only way to estimate physical quantities! And worryingly, in all the other examples we’d seen where BosonSampling could be used to estimate a number, the same number could also be estimated using one of several polynomial-time classical algorithms invented by Leonid Gurvits. So why should vibronic spectra be an exception?

After an email exchange with Alex Arkhipov, Juan Miguel Arrazola, Leonardo Novo, and Raul Garcia-Patron, I believe we finally got to the bottom of it, and the answer is: vibronic spectra are not an exception.

In terms of BosonSampling, the vibronic spectra task is simply to estimate the probability histogram of some weighted sum like $$w_1 s_1 + \cdots + w_ m s_m,$$ where w1,…,wm are fixed real numbers, and (s1,…,sm) is a possible outcome of the BosonSampling experiment, si representing the number of photons observed in mode i. Alas, while it takes some work, it turns out that Gurvits’s classical algorithms can be adapted to estimate these histograms. Granted, running the actual BosonSampling experiment would provide slightly more detailed information—namely, some exact sampled values of $$w_1 s_1 + \cdots + w_ m s_m,$$ rather than merely additive approximations to the values—but since we’d still need to sort those sampled values into coarse “bins” in order to compute a histogram, it’s not clear why that additional precision would ever be of chemical interest.

This is a pity, since if the vibronic spectra application had beaten what was doable classically, then it would’ve provided not merely a first practical use for BosonSampling, but also a lovely way to verify that a BosonSampling device was working as intended.

V. Application to Finding Dense Subgraphs?

A different potential application of Gaussian BosonSampling, first suggested by the Toronto-based startup Xanadu, is finding dense subgraphs in a graph. (Or at least, providing an initial seed to classical optimization methods that search for dense subgraphs.)

This is an NP-hard problem, so to say that I was skeptical of the proposal would be a gross understatement. Nevertheless, it turns out that there is a striking observation by the Xanadu team at the core of their proposal: namely that, given a graph G and a positive even integer k, a GBS device can be used to sample a random subgraph of G of size k, with probability proportional to the square of the number of perfect matchings in that subgraph. Cool, right? And potentially even useful, especially if the number of perfect matchings could serve as a rough indicator of the subgraph’s density! Alas, Xanadu’s Juan Miguel Arrazola himself recently told me that there’s a cubic-time classical algorithm for the same sampling task, so that the possible quantum speedup that one could get from GBS in this way is at most polynomial. The search for a useful application of BosonSampling continues!

And that’s all for now! I’m grateful to all the colleagues I talked to over the last couple weeks, including Alex Arkhipov, Juan Miguel Arrazola, Sergio Boixo, Raul Garcia-Patron, Leonid Gurvits, Gil Kalai, Chaoyang Lu, John Martinis, and Jelmer Renema, while obviously taking sole responsibility for any errors in the above. I look forward to a spirited discussion in the comments, and of course I’ll post updates as I learn more!

### Happy Chanukah / Vaccine Approval Day!

Friday, December 11th, 2020
1. Inspired by my survey article, John Pavlus has now published an article on Busy Beaver for Quanta magazine.
2. This week, I flitted back and forth between two virtual conferences: the Institute for Advanced Study’s Online Workshop on Qubits and Black Holes (which I co-organized with Juan Maldacena and Mark Van Raamsdonk), and Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) 2020, organized by QC Ware, for which I did my now-annual Ask-Me-Anything session. It was an interesting experience, switching between Euclidean path integrals and replica wormholes that I barely understood, and corporate pitches for near-term quantum computing that I … well, did understand! Anyway, happy to discuss either conference in the comments.
3. For anyone interested in the new Chinese quantum supremacy claim based on Gaussian BosonSampling—the story has developing rapidly all week, with multiple groups trying to understand the classical difficulty of simulating the experiment. I’ll plan to write a followup post soon!
4. The Complexity Zoo has now officially moved from the University of Waterloo to complexityzoo.net, hosted by the LessWrong folks! Thanks so much to Oliver Habryka for setting this up. Update (Dec. 12): Alas, complexityzoo.com no longer works if you use https. I don’t know how to fix it—the Bluehost control panel provides no options—and I’m not at a point in life where I can deal again with Bluehost SSL certificate hell. (How does everyone else deal with this shit? That’s the one part I don’t understand.) So, for now, you’ll need to update your bookmarks to complexityzoo.net.
5. In return for his help with Zoo, Oliver asked me to help publicize a handsome $29 five-book set, “A Map that Reflects the Territory,” containing a selection of the best essays from LessWrong, including multiple essays by the much-missed Scott Alexander, and an essay on common knowledge inspired by my own Common Knowledge and Aumann’s Agreement Theorem. (See also the FAQ.) If you know any LW fans, I can think of few better gifts to go under their Christmas tree or secular rationalist equivalent. ### Shor’s algorithm in higher dimensions: Guest post by Greg Kuperberg Monday, December 7th, 2020 Upbeat advertisement: If research in QC theory or CS theory otherwise is your thing, then wouldn’t you like to live in peaceful, quiet, bicycle-based Davis, California, and be a faculty member at the large, prestigious, friendly university known as UC Davis? In the QCQI sphere, you’d have Marina RadulaskiBruno NachtergaeleMartin FraasMukund RangamaniVeronika Hubeny, and Nick Curro as faculty colleagues, among others; and yours truly, and hopefully more people in the future. This year the UC Davis CS department has a faculty opening in quantum computing, and another faculty opening in CS theory including quantum computing. If you are interested, then time is of the essence, since the full-consideration deadline is December 15. In this guest post, I will toot my own horn about a paper in progress (hopefully nearly finished) that goes back to the revolutionary early days of quantum computing, namely Shor’s algorithm. The takeway: I think that the strongest multidimensional generalization of Shor’s algorithm has been missed for decades. It appears to be a new algorithm that does more than the standard generalization described by Kitaev. (Scott wanted me to channel Captain Kirk and boldly go with a takeaway, so I did.) Unlike Shor’s algorithm proper, I don’t know of any dramatic applications of this new algorithm. However, more than one quantum algorithm was discovered just because it looked interesting, and then found applications later. The input to Shor’s algorithm is a function $$f:\mathbb{Z} \to S$$, in other words a symbol-valued function $$f$$ on the integers, which is periodic with an unknown period $$p$$ and otherwise injective. In equations, $$f(x) = f(y)$$ if only if $$p$$ divides $$x-y$$. In saying that the input is a function $$f$$, I mean that Shor’s algorithm is provided with an algorithm to compute $$f$$ efficiently. Shor’s algorithm itself can then find the period $$p$$ in (quantum) polynomial time in the number of digits of $$p$$. (Not polynomial time in $$p$$, polynomial time in its logarithm.) If you’ve heard that Shor’s algorithm can factor integers, that is just one special case where $$f(x) = a^x$$ mod $$N$$, the integer to factor. In its generalized form, Shor’s algorithm is miraculous. In particular, if $$f$$ is a black-box function, then it is routine to prove that any classical algorithm to do the same thing needs exponentially many values of $$f$$, or values $$f(x)$$ where $$x$$ has exponentially many digits. Shor’s algorithm begat the Shor-Kitaev algorithm, which does the same thing for a higher dimensional periodic function $$f:\mathbb{Z}^d \to S$$, where $$f$$ is now periodic with respect to a lattice $$L$$. The Shor-Kitaev algorithm in turn begat the hidden subgroup problem (called HSP among friends), where $$\mathbb{Z}$$ or $$\mathbb{Z}^d$$ is replaced by a group $$G$$, and now $$f$$ is $$L$$-periodic for some subgroup $$L$$. HSP varies substantially in both its computationally difficulty and its complexity status, depending on the structure of $$G$$ as well as optional restrictions on $$L$$. A funny thing happened on the way to the forum in later work on HSP. Most of the later work has been in the special case that the ambient group $$G$$ is finite, even though $$G$$ is infinite in the famous case of Shor’s algorithm. My paper-to-be explores the hidden subgroup problem in various cases when $$G$$ is infinite. In particular, I noticed that even the case $$G = \mathbb{Z}^d$$ isn’t fully solved, because the Shor-Kitaev algorithm makes the extra assumption that $$L$$ is a maximum-rank lattice, or equivalently that $$L$$ a finite-index subgroup of $$\mathbb{Z}^d$$. As far as I know, the more general case where $$L$$ might have lower rank wasn’t treated previously. I found an extension of Shor-Kitaev to handle this case, which is I will sketch after discussing some points about HSP in general. ## Quantum algorithms for HSP Every known quantum algorithm for HSP has the same two opening steps. First prepare an equal superposition $$|\psi_G\rangle$$ of “all” elements of the ambient group $$G$$, then apply a unitary form of the hiding function $$f$$ to get the following: $U_f|\psi_G\rangle \propto \sum_{x \in G} |x,f(x)\rangle.$ Actually, you can only do exactly this when $$G$$ is a finite group. You cannot make an equal quantum superposition on an infinite set, for the same reason that you cannot choose an integer uniformly at random from among all of the integers: It would defy the laws of probability. Since computers are finite, a realistic quantum algorithm cannot make an unequal quantum superposition on an infinite set either. However, if $$G$$ is a well-behaved infinite group, then you can approximate the same idea by making an equal superposition on a large but finite box $$B \subseteq G$$ instead: $U_f|\psi_G\rangle \propto \sum_{x \in B \subseteq G} |x,f(x)\rangle.$ Quantum algorithms for HSP now follow a third counterintuitive “step”, namely, that you should discard the output qubits that contain the value $$f(x)$$. You should take the values of $$f$$ to be incomprehensible data, encrypted for all you know. A good quantum algorithm evaluates $$f$$ too few times to interpret its output, so you might as well let it go. (By contrast, a classical algorithm is forced to dig for the only meaningful information that the output of $$f$$ to have. Namely, it has to keep searching until it finds equal values.) What remains, want what turns out to be highly valuable, is the input state in a partially measured form. I remember joking with Cris Moore about the different ways of looking at this step: 1. You can measure the output qubits. 2. The janitor can fish the output qubits out of the trash and measure them for you. 3. You can secretly not measure the output qubits and say you did. 4. You can keep the output qubits and say you threw them away. Measuring the output qubits wins you the purely mathematical convenience that the posterior state on the input qubits is pure (a vector state) rather than mixed (a density matrix). However, since no use is made of the measured value, it truly makes no difference for the algorithm. The final universal step for all HSP quantum algorithms is to apply a quantum Fourier transform (or QFT) to the input register and measure the resulting Fourier mode. This might seem like a creative step that may or may not be a good idea. However, if you have an efficient algorithm for the QFT for your particular group $$G$$, then you might as well do this, because (taking the interpretation that you threw away the output register) the environment already knows the Fourier mode. You can assume that this Fourier mode has been published in the New York Times, and you won’t lose anything by reading the papers. ## Fourier modes and Fourier stripes I’ll now let $$G = \mathbb{Z}^d$$ and make things more explicit, for starters by putting arrows on elements $$\vec{x} \in \mathbb{Z}^d$$ to indicate that they are lattice vectors. The standard begining produces a superposition $$|\psi_{L+\vec{v}}\rangle$$ on a translate $$L+\vec{v}$$ of the hidden lattice $$L$$. (Again, $$L$$ is the periodicity of $$f$$.) If this state could be an equal superposition on the infinite set $$L+\vec{v}$$, and if you could do a perfect QFT on the infinite group $$\mathbb{Z}^d$$, then the resulting Fourier mode would be a randomly chosen element of a certain dual group $$L^\# \subseteq (\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d$$ inside the torus of Fourier modes of $$\mathbb{Z}^d$$. Namely, $$L^\#$$ consists of those vectors $$\vec{y} \in (\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d$$ whose such that the dot product $$\vec{x} \cdot \vec{y}$$ is an integer for every $$\vec{x} \in L$$. (If you expected the Fourier dual of the integers $$\mathbb{Z}$$ to be a circle $$\mathbb{R}/2\pi\mathbb{Z}$$ of length $$2\pi$$, I found it convenient here to rescale it to a circle $$\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}$$ of length 1. This is often considered gauche these days, like using $$h$$ instead of $$\hbar$$ in quantum mechanics, but in context it’s okay.) In principle, you can learn $$L^\#$$ from sampling it, and then learn $$L$$ from $$L^\#$$. Happily, the unknown and irrelevant translation vector $$\vec{v}$$ is erased in this method. In practice, it’s not so simple. As before, you cannot actually make an equal superposition on all of $$L+\vec{v}$$, but only trimmed to a box $$B \subseteq \mathbb{Z}^d$$. If you have $$q$$ qubits available for each coordinate of $$\mathbb{Z}^d$$, then $$B$$ might be a $$d$$-dimensional cube with $$Q = 2^q$$ lattice points in each direction. Following Peter Shor’s famous paper, the standard thing to do here is to identify $$B$$ with the finite group $$(\mathbb{Z}/Q)^d$$ and do the QFT there instead. This is gauche as pure mathematics, but it’s reasonable as computer science. In any case, it works, but it comes at a price. You should rescale the resulting Fourier mode $$\vec{y} \in (\mathbb{Z}/Q)^d$$ as $$\vec{y}_1 = \vec{y}/Q$$ to match it to the torus $$(\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d$$. Even if you do that, $$\vec{y}_1$$ is not actually a uniformly random element of $$L^\#$$, but rather a noisy, discretized approximation of one. In Shor’s algorithm, the remaining work is often interpreted as the post-climax. In this case $$L = p\mathbb{Z}$$, where $$p$$ is the hidden period of $$f$$, and $$L^\#$$ consists of the multiples of $$1/p$$ in $$\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}$$. The Fourier mode $$y_1$$ (skipping the arrow since we are in one dimension) is an approximation to some fraction $$r/p$$ with roughly $$q$$ binary digits of precision. ($$y_1$$ is often but not always the very best binary approximation to $$r/p$$ with the available precision.) If you have enough precision, you can learn a fraction from its digits, either in base 2 or in any base. For instance, if I’m thinking of a fraction that is approximately 0.2857, then 2/7 is much closer than any other fraction with a one-digit denominator. As many people know, and as Shor explained in his paper, continued fractions are an efficient and optimal algorithm for this in larger cases. The Shor-Kitaev algorithm works the same way. You can denoise each coordinate of each Fourier example $$\vec{y}_1$$ with the continued fraction algorithm to obtain an exact element $$\vec{y}_0 \in L^\#$$. You can learn $$L^\#$$ with a polynomial number of samples, and then learn $$L$$ from that with integer linear algebra. However, this approach can only work if $$L^\#$$ is a finite group, or equivalently when $$L$$ has maximum rank $$d$$. This condition is explicitly stated in Kitaev’s paper, and in most but not all of the papers and books that cite this algorithm. if $$L$$ has maximum rank, then the picture in Fourier space looks like this: However, if $$L$$ has rank $$\ell < d$$, then $$L^\#$$ is a pattern of $$(k-\ell)$$-dimensional stripes, like this instead: In this case, as the picture indicates, each coordinate of $$\vec{y}_1$$ is flat random and individually irreparable. If you knew the direction of the stripes, then you use could define a slanted coordinate system where some of the coordinates of $$\vec{y}_1$$ could be repaired. But the tangent directions of $$L^\#$$ essentially beg the question. They are the orthogonal space of $$L_\mathbb{R}$$, the vector space subtended by the hidden subgroup $$L$$. If you know $$L_\mathbb{R}$$, then you can find $$L$$ by running Shor-Kitaev in the lattice $$L_\mathbb{R} \cap \mathbb{Z}^d$$. My solution to this conundrum is to observe that the multiples of a randomly chosen point $$\vec{y}_0$$ in $$L^\#$$ have a good chance of filling out $$L^\#$$ adequately well, in particular to land near $$\vec{0}$$ often enough to reveal the tangent directions of $$L^\#$$. You have to make do with a noisy sample $$\vec{y}_1$$ instead, but by making the QFT radix $$Q$$ large enough, you can reduce the noise well enough for this to work. Still, even if you know that these small, high-quality multiples of $$\vec{y}_1$$ exist, they are needles in an exponential haystack of bad multiples, so how do you find them? It turns out that the versatile LLL algorithm, which finds a basis of short vectors in a lattice, can be used here. The multiples of $$\vec{y}_0$$ (say, for simplicity) aren’t a lattice, they are a dense orbit in $$L^\#$$ or part of it. However, they are a shadow of a lattice one dimension higher, that you can supply to the LLL algorithm. This step produces lets you compute the linear span $$L_\mathbb{R}$$ of $$L$$ from its perpendicular space, and then as mentioned you can use Shor-Kitaev to learn the exact geometry of $$L$$. ### Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling Thursday, December 3rd, 2020 Update (12/5): The Google team, along with Gil Kalai, have raised questions about whether the results of the new BosonSampling experiment might be easier to spoof classically than the USTC team thought they were, because of a crucial difference between BosonSampling and qubit-based random circuit sampling. Namely, with random circuit sampling, the marginal distribution over any k output qubits (for small k) is exponentially close to the uniform distribution. With BosonSampling, by contrast, the marginal distribution over k output modes is distinguishable from uniform, as Arkhipov and I noted in a 2013 followup paper. On the one hand, these easily-detected nonuniformities provide a quick, useful sanity check for whether BosonSampling is being done correctly. On the other hand, they might also give classical spoofing algorithms more of a toehold. The question is whether, by spoofing the k-mode marginals, a classical algorithm could also achieve scores on the relevant “HOG” (Heavy Output Generation) benchmark that are comparable to what the USTC team reported. One way or the other, this question should be resolvable by looking at the data that’s already been collected, and we’re trying now to get to the bottom of it. And having failed to flag this potential issue when I reviewed the paper, I felt a moral obligation at least to let my readers know about it as soon as I did. If nothing else, this is an answer to those who claim this stuff is all obvious. Please pardon the science underway! A group led by Jianwei Pan and Chao-Yang Lu, based mainly at USTC in Hefei, China, announced today that it achieved BosonSampling with 40-70 detected photons—up to and beyond the limit where a classical supercomputer could feasibly verify the results. (Technically, they achieved a variant called Gaussian BosonSampling: a generalization of what I called Scattershot BosonSampling in a 2013 post on this blog.) For more, see also Emily Conover’s piece in Science News, or Daniel Garisto’s in Scientific American, both of which I consulted on. (Full disclosure: I was one of the reviewers for the Pan group’s Science paper, and will be writing the Perspective article to accompany it.) The new result follows the announcement of 14-photon BosonSampling by the same group a year ago. It represents the second time quantum supremacy has been reported, following Google’s celebrated announcement from last year, and the first time it’s been done using photonics rather than superconducting qubits. As the co-inventor of BosonSampling (with Alex Arkhipov), obviously I’m gratified about this. For anyone who regards it as boring or obvious, here and here is Gil Kalai, on this blog, telling me why BosonSampling would never scale beyond 8-10 photons. (He wrote that, if aliens forced us to try, then much like with the Ramsey number R(6,6), our only hope would be to attack the aliens.) Here’s Kalai making a similar prediction, on the impossibility of quantum supremacy by BosonSampling or any other means, in his plenary address to the International Congress of Mathematicians two years ago. Even if we set aside the quantum computing skeptics, many colleagues told me they thought experimental BosonSampling was a dead end, because of photon losses and the staggering difficulty of synchronizing 50-100 single-photon sources. They said that a convincing demonstration of quantum supremacy would have to await the arrival of quantum fault-tolerance—or at any rate, some hardware platform more robust than photonics. I always agreed that they might be right. Furthermore, even if 50-photon BosonSampling was possible, after Google reached the supremacy milestone first with superconducting qubits, it wasn’t clear if anyone would still bother. Even when I learned a year ago about the USTC group’s intention to go for it, I was skeptical, figuring I’d believe it when I saw it. Obviously the new result isn’t dispositive. Nevertheless, as someone whose intellectual origins are close to pure math, it’s strange and exciting to find myself in a field where, once in a while, the world itself gets to weigh in on a theoretical disagreement. Since excitement is best when paired with accurate understanding, please help yourself to the following FAQ, which I might add more to over the next couple days. What is BosonSampling? You must be new here! Briefly, it’s a proposal for achieving quantum supremacy by simply passing identical, non-interacting photons through an array of beamsplitters, and then measuring where they end up. For more: in increasing order of difficulty, here’s an MIT News article from back in 2011, here’s the Wikipedia page, here are my PowerPoint slides, here are my lecture notes from Rio de Janeiro, and here’s my original paper with Arkhipov. What is quantum supremacy? Roughly, the use of a programmable or configurable quantum computer to solve some well-defined computational problem much faster than we know how to solve it with any existing classical computer. “Quantum supremacy,” a term coined by John Preskill in 2012, does not mean useful QC, or scalable QC, or fault-tolerant QC, all of which remain outstanding challenges. For more, see my Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ, or (e.g.) my recent Lytle Lecture for the University of Washington. If Google already announced quantum supremacy a year ago, what’s the point of this new experiment? To me, at least, quantum supremacy seems important enough to do at least twice! Also, as I said, this represents the first demonstration that quantum supremacy is possible via photonics. Finally, as the authors point out, the new experiment has one big technical advantage compared to Google’s: namely, many more possible output states (~1030 of them, rather than a mere ~9 quadrillion). This makes it infeasible to calculate the whole probability distribution over outputs and store it on a gigantic hard disk (after which one could easily generate as many samples as one wanted), which is what IBM proposed doing in its response to Google’s announcement. Is BosonSampling a form of universal quantum computing? No, we don’t even think it can simulate universal classical computing! It’s designed for exactly one task: namely, demonstrating quantum supremacy and refuting Gil Kalai. It might have some other applications besides that, but if so, they’ll be icing on the cake. This is in contrast to Google’s Sycamore processor, which in principle is a universal quantum computer, just with a severe limit on the number of qubits (53) and how many layers of gates one can apply to them (about 20). Is BosonSampling at least a step toward universal quantum computing? I think so! In 2000, Knill, Laflamme, and Milburn (KLM) famously showed that pure, non-interacting photons, passing through a network of beamsplitters, are capable of universal QC, provided we assume one extra thing: namely, the ability to measure the photons at intermediate times, and change which beamsplitters to apply to the remaining photons depending on the outcome. In other words, “BosonSampling plus adaptive measurements equals universality.” Basically, KLM is the holy grail that experimental optics groups around the world have been working toward for 20 years, with BosonSampling just a more achievable pit stop along the way. Are there any applications of BosonSampling? We don’t know yet. There are proposals in the literature to apply BosonSampling to vibronic spectra in quantum chemistry, finding dense subgraphs, and other problems, but I’m not yet sure whether these proposals will yield real speedups over the best we can do with classical computers, for a task of practical interest that involves estimating specific numbers (as opposed to sampling tasks, where BosonSampling almost certainly does yield exponential speedups, but which are rarely the thing practitioners directly care about). [See this comment for further discussion of the issues regarding dense subgraphs.] In a completely different direction, one could try to use BosonSampling to generate cryptographically certified random bits, along the lines of my proposal from 2018, much like one could with qubit-based quantum circuits. How hard is it to simulate BosonSampling on a classical computer? As far as we know today, the difficulty of simulating a “generic” BosonSampling experiment increases roughly like 2n, where n is the number of detected photons. It might be easier than that, particularly when noise and imperfections are taken into account; and at any rate it might be easier to spoof the statistical tests that one applies to verify the outputs. I and others managed to give some theoretical evidence against those possibilities, but just like with Google’s experiment, it’s conceivable that some future breakthrough will change the outlook and remove the case for quantum supremacy. Do you have any amusing stories? When I refereed the Science paper, I asked why the authors directly verified the results of their experiment only for up to 26-30 photons, relying on plausible extrapolations beyond that. While directly verifying the results of n-photon BosonSampling takes ~2n time for any known classical algorithm, I said, surely it should be possible with existing computers to go up to n=40 or n=50? A couple weeks later, the authors responded, saying that they’d now verified their results up to n=40, but it burned$400,000 worth of supercomputer time so they decided to stop there. This was by far the most expensive referee report I ever wrote!

Also: when Covid first started, and facemasks were plentiful in China but almost impossible to get in the US, Chao-Yang Lu, one of the leaders of the new work and my sometime correspondent on the theory of BosonSampling, decided to mail me a box of 200 masks (I didn’t ask for it). I don’t think that influenced my later review, but it was appreciated nonetheless.

Huge congratulations to the whole team for their accomplishment!

### Happy Thanksgiving Y’All!

Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

While a lot of pain is still ahead, this year I’m thankful that a dark chapter in American history might be finally drawing to a close. I’m thankful that the mRNA vaccines actually work. I’m thankful that my family has remained safe, and I’m thankful for all the essential workers who’ve kept our civilization running.

A few things:

1. Friend-of-the-blog Jelani Nelson asked me to advertise an important questionnaire for theoretical computer scientists, about what the future of STOC and FOCS should look like (for example, should they become all virtual?). It only takes 2 or 3 minutes to fill out (I just did).
2. Here’s a podcast that I recently did with UT Austin undergraduate Dwarkesh Patel. (As usual, I recommend 2x speed to compensate for my verbal tics.)
3. Feel free to use the comments on this post to talk about recent progress in quantum computing or computational complexity! Like, I dunno, a (sub)exponential black-box speedup for the adiabatic algorithm, or anti-concentration for log-depth random quantum circuits, or an improved shadow tomography procedure, or a quantum algorithm for nonlinear differential equations, or a barrier to proving strong 3-party parallel repetition, or equivalence of one-way functions and time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity, or turning any hard-on-average NP problem into one that’s guaranteed to have solutions.
4. It’s funny how quantum computing, P vs. NP, and so forth can come to feel like just an utterly mundane day job, not something anyone outside a small circle could possibly want to talk about while the fate of civilization hangs in the balance. Sometimes it takes my readers to remind me that not only are these topics what brought most of you here in the first place, they’re also awesome! So, I’ll mark that down as one more thing to be thankful for.

### The Complexity Zoo needs a new home

Thursday, November 12th, 2020

Update (Nov. 14): I now have a deluge of serious hosting offers—thank you so much, everyone! No need for more.

Since I’m now feeling better that the first authoritarian coup attempt in US history will probably sort itself out OK, here’s a real problem:

Nearly a score years ago, I created the Complexity Zoo, a procrastination project turned encyclopedia of complexity classes. Nearly half a score years ago, the Zoo moved to my former employer, the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada, which graciously hosted it ever since. Alas, IQC has decided that it can no longer do so. The reason is new regulations in Ontario about the accessibility of websites, which the Zoo might be out of compliance with. My students and I were willing to look into what was needed—like, does the polynomial hierarchy need ramps between its levels or something? The best would be if we heard from actual blind or other disabled complexity enthusiasts about how we could improve their experience, rather than trying to parse bureaucratese from the Ontario government. But IQC informed us that in any case, they can’t deal with the potential liability and their decision is final. I thank them for hosting the Zoo for eight years.

Now I’m looking for a volunteer for a new host. The Zoo runs on the MediaWiki platform, which doesn’t work with my own hosting provider (Bluehost) but is apparently easy to set up if you, unlike me, are the kind of person who can do such things. The IQC folks kindly offered to help with the transfer; I and my students can help as well. It’s a small site with modest traffic. The main things I need are just assurances that you can host the site for a long time (“forever” or thereabouts), and that you or someone else in your organization will be reachable if the site goes down or if there are other problems. I own the complexityzoo.com domain and can redirect from there.

In return, you’ll get the immense prestige of hosting such a storied resource for theoretical computer science … plus free publicity for your cause or organization on Shtetl-Optimized, and the eternal gratitude of thousands of my readers.

Of course, if you’re into complexity theory, and you want to update or improve the Zoo while you’re at it, then so much the awesomer! It could use some updates, badly. But you don’t even need to know P from NP.

Unrelated Announcement: I’ll once again be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session at the Q2B (“Quantum to Business”) conference, December 8-10. Other speakers include Umesh Vazirani, John Preskill, Jennifer Ouellette, Eric Schmidt, and many others. Since the conference will of course be virtual this year, registration is a lot cheaper than in previous years. Check it out! (Full disclosure: Q2B is organized by QC Ware, Inc., for which I’m a scientific advisor.)

### My second podcast with Lex Fridman

Monday, October 12th, 2020

Here it is—enjoy! (I strongly recommend listening at 2x speed.)

We recorded it a month ago—outdoors (for obvious covid reasons), on a covered balcony in Austin, as it drizzled all around us. Topics included:

• Whether the universe is a simulation
• Eugene Goostman, GPT-3, the Turing Test, and consciousness
• Why I disagree with Integrated Information Theory
• Why I disagree with Penrose’s ideas about physics and the mind
• Intro to complexity theory, including P, NP, PSPACE, BQP, and SZK
• The US’s catastrophic failure on covid
• The importance of the election
• My objections to cancel culture
• The role of love in my life (!)

Thanks so much to Lex for his characteristically probing questions, apologies as always for my verbal tics, and here’s our first podcast for those who missed that one.

### My Utility+ podcast with Matthew Putman

Thursday, September 3rd, 2020

Another Update (Sep. 15): Sorry for the long delay; new post coming soon! To tide you over—or just to distract you from the darkness figuratively and literally engulfing our civilization—here’s a Fortune article about today’s announcement by IBM of its plans for the next few years in superconducting quantum computing, with some remarks from yours truly.

Another Update (Sep. 8): A reader wrote to let me know about a fundraiser for Denys Smirnov, a 2015 IMO gold medalist from Ukraine who needs an expensive bone marrow transplant to survive Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I just donated and I hope you’ll consider it too!

Update (Sep. 5): Here’s another quantum computing podcast I did, “Dunc Tank” with Duncan Gammie. Enjoy!

Thanks so much to Shtetl-Optimized readers, so far we’ve raised $1,371 for the Biden-Harris campaign and$225 for the Lincoln Project, which I intend to match for $3,192 total. If you’d like to donate by tonight (Thursday night), there’s still$404 to go!

Meanwhile, a mere three days after declaring my “new motto,” I’ve come up with a new new motto for this blog, hopefully a more cheerful one:

When civilization seems on the brink of collapse, sometimes there’s nothing left to talk about but maximal separations between randomized and quantum query complexity.

On that note, please enjoy my new one-hour podcast on Spotify (if that link doesn’t work, try this one) with Matthew Putman of Utility+. Alas, my umming and ahhing were more frequent than I now aim for, but that’s partly compensated for by Matthew’s excellent decision to speed up the audio. This was an unusually wide-ranging interview, covering everything from SlateStarCodex to quantum gravity to interdisciplinary conferences to the challenges of teaching quantum computing to 7-year-olds. I hope you like it!

### The Busy Beaver Frontier

Thursday, July 23rd, 2020

Update (July 27): I now have a substantially revised and expanded version (now revised and expanded even a second time), which incorporates (among other things) the extensive feedback that I got from this blog post. There are new philosophical remarks, some lovely new open problems, and an even-faster-growing (!) integer sequence. Check it out!

Another Update (August 13): Nick Drozd now has a really nice blog post about his investigations of my Beeping Busy Beaver (BBB) function.

A life that was all covid, cancellations, and Trump, all desperate rearguard defense of the beleaguered ideals of the Enlightenment, would hardly be worth living. So it was an exquisite delight, these past two weeks, to forget current events and write an 18-page survey article about the Busy Beaver function: the staggeringly quickly-growing function that probably encodes a huge portion of all interesting mathematical truth in its first hundred values, if only we could know those values or exploit them if we did.

The Busy Beaver Frontier
by Scott Aaronson

The Busy Beaver function, with its incomprehensibly rapid growth, has captivated generations of computer scientists, mathematicians, and hobbyists. In this survey, I offer a personal view of the BB function 58 years after its introduction, emphasizing lesser-known insights, recent progress, and especially favorite open problems. Examples of such problems include: when does the BB function first exceed the Ackermann function? Is the value of BB(20) independent of set theory? Can we prove that BB(n+1)>2BB(n) for large enough n? Given BB(n), how many advice bits are needed to compute BB(n+1)? Do all Busy Beavers halt on all inputs, not just the 0 input? Is it decidable whether BB(n) is even or odd?

The article is slated to appear soon in SIGACT News. I’m grateful to Bill Gasarch for suggesting it—even with everything else going on, this was a commission I felt I couldn’t turn down!

Besides Bill, I’m grateful to the various Busy Beaver experts who answered my inquiries, to Marijn Heule and Andy Drucker for suggesting some of the open problems, to Marijn for creating a figure, and to Lily, my 7-year-old daughter, for raising the question about the first value of n at which the Busy Beaver function exceeds the Ackermann function. (Yes, Lily’s covid homeschooling has included multiple lessons on very large positive integers.)

There are still a few days until I have to deliver the final version. So if you spot anything wrong or in need of improvement, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send an email. Thanks in advance!

Of course Busy Beaver has been an obsession that I’ve returned to many times in my life: for example, in that Who Can Name the Bigger Number? essay that I wrote way back when I was 18, in Quantum Computing Since Democritus, in my public lecture at Festivaletteratura, and in my 2016 paper with Adam Yedidia that showed that the values of all Busy Beaver numbers beyond the 7910th are independent of the axioms of set theory (Stefan O’Rear has since shown that independence starts at the 748th value or sooner). This survey, however, represents the first time I’ve tried to take stock of BusyBeaverology as a research topic—collecting in one place all the lesser-known theorems and empirical observations and open problems that I found the most striking, in the hope of inspiring not just contemplation or wonderment but actual progress.

Within the last few months, the world of deep mathematics that you can actually explain to a child lost two of its greatest giants: John Conway (who died of covid, and who I eulogized here) and Ron Graham. One thing I found poignant, and that I didn’t know before I started writing, is that Conway and Graham both play significant roles in the story of the Busy Beaver function. Conway, because most of the best known candidates for Busy Beaver Turing machines turn out, when you analyze them, to be testing variants of the notorious Collatz Conjecture—and Conway is the one who proved, in 1972, that the set of “Collatz-like questions” is Turing-undecidable. And Graham because of Graham’s number from Ramsey theory—a candidate for the biggest number that’s ever played a role in mathematical research—and because of the discovery, four years ago, that the 18th Busy Beaver number exceeds Graham’s number.

(“Just how big is Graham’s number? So big that the 17th Busy Beaver number is not yet known to exceed it!”)

Anyway, I tried to make the survey pretty accessible, while still providing enough technical content to sink one’s two overgrown front teeth into (don’t worry, there are no such puns in the piece itself). I hope you like reading it at least 1/BB(10) as much as I liked writing it.

Update (July 24): Longtime commenter Joshua Zelinsky gently reminded me that one of the main questions discussed in the survey—namely, whether we can prove BB(n+1)>2BB(n) for all large enough n—was first brought to my attention by him, Joshua, in a 2013 Ask-Me-Anything session on this blog! I apologize to Joshua for the major oversight, which has now been corrected. On the positive side, we just got a powerful demonstration both of the intellectual benefits of blogging, and of the benefits of sharing paper drafts on one’s blog before sending them to the editor!