Happy 4th to those in the US! The group of Chaoyang Lu and Jianwei Pan, based at USTC in China, has been on a serious quantum supremacy tear lately. Recall that last December, USTC announced […]
Tag: scottaaronson
Happy birthday to Alan Turing! This week I’m participating virtually in STOC’2021, which today had a celebration of the 50th anniversary of NP-completeness (featuring Steve Cook, Richard Karp, Leonid Levin, Christos Papadimitriou, and Avi Wigderson), […]
The other night Dana and I watched “The Internet’s Own Boy,” the 2014 documentary about the life and work of Aaron Swartz, which I’d somehow missed when it came out. Swartz, for anyone who doesn’t […]
I now have a feature article up at Quanta magazine, entitled “What Makes Quantum Computing So Hard To Explain?” I.e., why do journalists, investors, etc. so consistently get central points wrong, even after the subject […]
Yesterday, I had fun doing an open-ended Q&A at the Astral Codex Ten weekly online meetup. See here for the YouTube video. The questions were mainly about quantum computing, but ranged over various other topics […]
Holy crap. In case you’re wondering how I spent such a milestone of a day: well, I spent hours of it at an important virtual grant review meeting with the Department of Defense. Alas, when […]
You’ll hear that it’s not as simple as the Israelis are good guys and Palestinians are bad guys, or vice versa. And that’s true. But it’s also not so complicated that there are no clearly […]
For those who read my reply to Richard Borcherds on “teapot supremacy”: seeking better data, I ordered a dozen terra cotta flowerpots, and smashed eight of them on my driveway with my 4-year-old son, dropping […]
Peter Singer, in the parable that came to represent his whole worldview and that of the effective altruism movement more generally, asked us to imagine that we could save a drowning child at the cost […]
Richard Borcherds is a British mathematician at Berkeley, who won the 1998 Fields Medal for the proof of the monstrous moonshine conjecture among many other contributions. A couple months ago, Borcherds posted on YouTube a […]
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