Scott Aaronson
239 FOLLOWERS
I'm David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center. Prior to coming here, I taught for nine years in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. My research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.
Scott Aaronson
15h ago
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
Scott Aaronson
5d ago
Back in 2006, in the midst of an unusually stupid debate in the comment section of Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch’s blog, someone chimed in:
Since the point of theoretical computer science is solely to recognize who is the most badass theoretical computer scientist, I can only say:
GO HOME PUNKS!
WIGDERSON OWNS YOU!
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 scientist ..read more
Scott Aaronson
1w ago
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
Scott Aaronson
3w ago
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
Scott Aaronson
1M ago
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
Scott Aaronson
1M ago
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
Scott Aaronson
2M ago
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
Scott Aaronson
4M ago
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
Scott Aaronson
4M ago
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
Scott Aaronson
4M ago
Over at Astral Codex Ten, the other Scott A. blogs in detail about a genetically engineered mouth bacterium that metabolizes sugar into alcohol rather than acid, thereby (assuming it works as intended) ending dental cavities forever. Despite good results in trials with hundreds of people, this bacterium has spent decades in FDA approval hell. It’s in the news because Lantern Bioworks, a startup founded by rationalists, is now trying again to legalize it.
Just another weird idea that will never see the light of day, I’d think … if I didn’t have these bacteria in my mouth right now.
Here’s how i ..read more