Linkz!

(1) Fellow CS theory blogger (and, 20 years ago, member of my PhD thesis committee) Luca Trevisan interviews me about Shtetl-Optimized, for the Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. (Scroll down to page 195 in the PDF file, page 187 in the issue.) Questions include: what motivates me to blog, who my main inspirations are, my favorite posts, whether blogging has influenced my actual research, and my thoughts on the role of public intellectuals in the age of social-media outrage.

(2) Anurag Anshu, Nikolas Breuckmann, and Chinmay Nirkhe have apparently proved the NLTS (No Low-Energy Trivial States) Conjecture! This is considered a major step toward a proof of the famous Quantum PCP Conjecture, which—speaking of one of Luca Trevisan’s questions—was first publicly raised right here on Shtetl-Optimized back in 2006.

(3) The Microsoft team has finally released its promised paper about the detection of Majorana zero modes (“this time for real”), a major step along the way to creating topological qubits. See also this live YouTube peer review—is that a thing now?—by Vincent Mourik and Sergey Frolov, the latter having been instrumental in the retraction of Microsoft’s previous claim along these lines. I’ll leave further discussion to people who actually understand the experiments.

(4) I’m looking forward to the 2022 Conference on Computational Complexity less than two weeks from now, in my … safe? clean? beautiful? awe-inspiring? … birth-city of Philadelphia. There I’ll listen to a great lineup of talks, including one by my PhD student William Kretschmer on his joint work with me and DeVon Ingram on The Acrobatics of BQP, and to co-receive the CCC Best Paper Award (wow! thanks!) for that work. I look forward to meeting some old and new Shtetl-Optimized readers there.