FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – From the university campuses of Assyria to the thoroughfares of Ur to the palaces of the Hittite Empire, students across the Fertile Crescent have formed human chains, camel caravans, and even makeshift tent cities to protest the oppression of innocent Egyptians by the rogue proto-nation of “Israel” and its vengeful, warlike deity Yahweh. According to leading human rights organizations, the Hebrews, under the leadership of a bearded extremist known as Moses or “Genocide Moe,” have unleashed frogs, wild beasts, hail, locusts, cattle disease, and other prohibited collecti ..read more

For those who don’t yet know from their other social media: a week ago the cryptographer Yilei Chen posted a preprint, eprint.iacr.org/2024/555, claiming to give a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve lattice problems. For example, it claims to solve the GapSVP problem, which asks to approximate the length of the shortest nonzero vector in a given n-dimensional lattice, to within an approximation ratio of ~n4.5. The best approximation ratio previously known to be achievable in classical or quantum polynomial time was exponential in n. If it’s correct, this is an extremely big deal. It d ..read more

I can’t find it now, but nearly 20 years ago, in the midst of an unusually stupid debate in the comment section of Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch’s blog, someone chimed in: “the argument about who’s the world’s most badass theoretical computer scientist is officially over. Wigderson owns you. You can all go home, punks.” Avi Wigderson: central unifying figure of theoretical computer science for decades; consummate generalist who’s contributed to pretty much every corner of the field; advocate and cheerleader for the field; postdoc adviser to a large fraction of all theoretical computer scient ..read more

Pissing away my life in a haze of doomscrolling, sporadic attempts to “parent” two rebellious kids, and now endless conversations about AI safety, I’m liable to forget for days that I’m still mostly known (such as I am) as a quantum computing theorist, and this blog is still mostly known as a quantum computing blog. Maybe it’s just that I spent a quarter-century on quantum computing theory. As an ADHD sufferer, anything could bore me after that much time, even one of the a-priori most exciting things in the world. It’s like, some young whippersnappers proved another monster 80-page theorem tha ..read more

Dear Twitter Anti-Zionists, For five months, ever since Oct. 7, I’ve read you obsessively. While my current job is supposed to involve protecting humanity from the dangers of AI (with a side of quantum computing theory), I’m ashamed to say that half the days I don’t do any science; instead I just scroll and scroll, reading anti-Israel content and then pro-Israel content and then more anti-Israel content. I thought refusing to post on Twitter would save me from wasting my life there as so many others have, but apparently it doesn’t, not anymore. (No, I won’t call it “X.”) At the high end of the ..read more

In fact, don’t try to take kids to Washington DC if you can possibly avoid it. This is my public service announcement. This is the value I feel I can add to the world today. Dana and I decided to take the kids to DC for spring break. The trip, alas, has been hell—a constant struggle against logistical failures. The first days were mostly spent sitting in traffic or searching for phantom parking spaces that didn’t exist. (So then we switched to the Metro, and promptly got lost, and had our metro cards rejected by the machines.) Or, at crowded cafes, I spent the time searching for a table so my ..read more

Update: Alright, I’m back in. (After trying the same recovery mechanisms that didn’t work before, but suddenly did work this afternoon.) Thanks also to the Facebook employee who emailed offering to help. Now I just need to decide the harder question of whether I want to be back in! So I’ve been locked out of Facebook and Messenger, possibly forever. It started yesterday morning, when Facebook went down for the entire world. Now it’s back up for most people, but I can’t get in—neither with passwords (none of which work), nor with text messages to my phone (my phone doesn’t receive them for some ..read more

Unrelated Announcement (Feb. 7): Huge congratulations to longtime friend-of-the-blog John Preskill for winning the 2024 John Stewart Bell Prize for research on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics! On the heels of my post on the fermion doubling problem, I’m sorry to spend even more time on the simulation hypothesis. I promise this will be the last for a long time. Last week, I attended a philosophy-of-mind conference called MindFest at Florida Atlantic University, where I talked to Stuart Hameroff (Roger Penrose’s collaborator on the “Orch-OR” theory of microtubule consciousness) and many ..read more

David Soloveichik, my friend and colleague in UT Austin’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, and I are looking to hire a postdoc in “Unconventional Computing,” broadly defined. Areas of interest include but are not limited to: (1) quantum computation, (2) thermodynamics of computation and reversible computation, (3) analog computation, and (4) chemical computation. The ideal candidate would have broad multi-disciplinary interests in addition to prior experience and publications in at least one of these areas. The researcher will work closely with David and myself bu ..read more

This fall, I’m honored to have made a new friend: the noted Chinese dissident scholar Rowena He, currently a Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at UT Austin, and formerly of Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and other fine places. I was connected to Rowena by the Harvard computer scientist Harry Lewis. But let’s cut to the chase, as Rowena tends to do in every conversation. As a teenage girl in Guangdong, Rowena eagerly participated in the pro-democracy protests of 1989, the ones that tragically culminated in the Tiananmen Square mas ..read more