Joey Marcellino

Pierre Me­nard, pixel art, and entropy

• Joey Marcellino 17 Mar 2023 12:35 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Viliam’s Shortform

  Just to (hopefully) make the distinction a bit more clear:

  A true copying operation would take |psi1>|0> to |psi1>|psi1>; that’s to say, it would take as input one qubit in an arbitrary quantum state and a second qubit in |0>, and output two qubits in the same arbitrary quantum state that the first qubit was in. For our example, we’ll take |psi1> to be an equal superposition of 0 and 1: |psi1> = |0> + |1> (ignoring normalization).

  If CNOT is a copying operation, it should take (|0> + |1>)|0> to (|0> + |1>)(|0> + |1>) = |00> + |01> + |10> + |11>. But as you noticed, what it actually does is create an entangled state (in this case, a Bell state) that looks like |00> + |11>.

  So in some sense yes, the forbidden thing is to have a state copied and not entangled, but more importantly in this case CNOT just doesn’t copy the state, so there’s no tension with the no-cloning theorem.

• Joey Marcellino 30 Mar 2023 22:24 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: ~100 In­ter­est­ing Questions

  What does quantum entanglement mean for causality? Due to entanglement, there can be spacelike separated measurements such that there exists a reference frame > where it looks like measurement A precedes and has a causal influence on the outcomes of measurement B, and > also a reference frame where it looks like measurement B precedes and has a causal influence on the outcomes of measurement A.

  “Causality” is already a somewhat fraught notion in fundamental physics irrespective of quantum mechanics; it’s not clear that one needs to have some sort of notion of causality in order to do physics, nor that the universe necessarily obeys some underlying causal law. To the extent that quantum mechanics breaks our common-sense notions of causality, it’s only in this very particular sense (where it seems like Alice measuring first “causes” Bob’s measurement to take a certain value, or vice versa), and since neither party can use a measurement scheme like this to send information, the breakage doesn’t invite paradoxes or any sort of other weirdness.

  Outside of philosophical musings about causality (which, to be clear, I think are perfectly valid and interesting) it suffices to say that entangled systems exhibit correlations without a common cause, and leave it at that.

  If you’re interested in a recent technical discussion of some of these ideas, I recommend the following paper: https://​​arxiv.org/​​pdf/​​2208.02721.pdf

• Joey Marcellino 24 May 2023 14:07 UTC

  12 points

  5

  on: No—AI is just as en­ergy-effi­cient as your brain.

  The conclusion seems rather to be “human metabolism is less efficient than solar panels,” which, while perhaps true, has limited bearing on the question of whether or not the brain is thermodynamically efficient as a computer when compared to current or future AI. The latter is the question that recent discussion has been focused on, and to which the “No - ” in the title makes it seem like you’re responding.

  Moreover, while a quick Google search turns up 100W as the average resting power output of a person, another search suggests the brain is only responsible for about 20% of energy consumption per time. Adding this to your analysis gives .13% “efficiency” in the sense that you’re using it, so the brain still outperforms AI even on this admittedly rather odd sunlight-to-capability metric.

On martingales

• Joey Marcellino 19 Sep 2023 20:31 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Zander_Drax’s comment on: On martingales

  Sure, one can always embed a game inside another one and so alter the overall expectation values how one likes. That said, we still only want to play the meta-game if it had positive expectation value, no?