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eigenloss commented on What is a ket? How do traits work? Quantum computing in Rust, part 1   walther.guru/blog/impl-qu... · Posted by u/Walther
Walther · 6 years ago
Thank you for your feedback!

You're right, the essay needs a better explanation on what a ket and a quantum state is. I'll figure something out.

Excellent point with the superposition, I'll add that in! Same with the normalization - while adding the `is_valid` method to the struct makes sense programming story -wise, it'd be great to justify its origins and implications.

As for using Rust being pointless - I am writing this blog post series for three reasons: learning more Rust by doing, learning more quantum computing by doing, and sharing my journey as a tutorial. Using Rust for the sake of learning (and hopefully helping others learn) Rust is in my opinion a perfect reason to use Rust.

As for calling this QC - I'd clarify that this code does not intend to be a production-grade QC library, and the blog post series does not intend to be an exact, axioms-and-proofs type of an university level course that prepares you for the industry in one go. I'd think of it more as a Todo MVC app building journey with a quantum flavor - or something. That being said, I do plan to add more QC features in the next posts of the series, and incrementally add to the accuracy as much as I feasibly can. All this feedback here and links to more materials are helping me immensely, I want to learn more about this stuff!

Thank you for calling it very cute - I really appreciate that! ️

eigenloss · 6 years ago
McIntyre or Griffiths' QM might be useful.
eigenloss commented on What is a ket? How do traits work? Quantum computing in Rust, part 1   walther.guru/blog/impl-qu... · Posted by u/Walther
najarvg · 6 years ago
Clearly OT but the excessive reliance on foo and bar in many of my early C lang learning examples really slowed down my ability to transfer said techniques into something meaningful. Eventually one of my friends working in the Visual C++ team (I'm dating myself here) explained the connection of foo and bar to fubar and kind of felt like this!
eigenloss · 6 years ago
I had the same experience; that's mostly what I'm referencing. Trying to use things like The Hacker's Dictionary (largely in-jokes, bad jargon, and obnoxious circular definitions) to clear it up made the problem worse. I get that it's just a humor book, but still.

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eigenloss commented on What is a ket? How do traits work? Quantum computing in Rust, part 1   walther.guru/blog/impl-qu... · Posted by u/Walther
saalweachter · 6 years ago
Sometimes I don't know whether to be proud of or disappointed in our species.
eigenloss · 6 years ago
Yeah, it's not like any programmers have ever come up with bizzare and useless names for abstractions.
_wzsf commented on The “Talk”   smbc-comics.com/comic/the... · Posted by u/ChuckMcM
vanderZwan · 6 years ago
Apparently this was a collaboration with Scott Aaronson:

> Drawn with great humility and thanks to one of my favorite people. Scott did all of the real work, and I threw in some dirty jokes. So, hey, a pretty good deal all around.

_wzsf · 6 years ago
> Apparently this was a collaboration with Scott Aaronson:

Gee, I wish they'd mentioned that in the literal first panel of the comic.

eigenloss commented on AirPods Pro   apple.com/airpods-pro/... · Posted by u/minimaxir
arkitaip · 6 years ago
The copywriting is so mediocre in its attempts to be funny or witty in every heading.
eigenloss · 6 years ago
At least they've made a new competitor to the linguistic mockery that is Carls Jr.
_wzsf commented on AirPods Pro   apple.com/airpods-pro/... · Posted by u/minimaxir
webwielder2 · 6 years ago
Let alone headphones? You could throw away a pair of AirPods every day and it would still constitute a tiny fraction of what (Americans) produce in waste on a yearly basis.
_wzsf · 6 years ago
"It doesn't matter how much garbage I produce, everyone else makes way more!"
eigenloss commented on What is a ket? How do traits work? Quantum computing in Rust, part 1   walther.guru/blog/impl-qu... · Posted by u/Walther
Walther · 6 years ago
Thank you for feedback! Going to read the paper to improve my understanding. I'm writing this blog series in part to learn more - both about quantum computing as well as Rust. As some people say, teaching is a great way to learn (or at least check your knowledge).

What do you think would be a good correction or disclaimer to add? Would it be sufficient to e.g. say that in this first part, we only implement a two-component ket? Generalizing the ket type to an arbitrary-size vector while keeping type constraints, perhaps briefly mentioning const generics (an upcoming language feature), etc could easily make for another part in this series. Making the ket into an actual vector could then give way to doing proper linear algebra on them, cleaning up some of the manually implemented operations here, as their teaching purpose has been fulfilled already.

Thoughts?

eigenloss · 6 years ago
Having "quantum computing" in the title makes this genuine clickbait when the body lacks any explanation of what a state is or what a ket is. Energy or momentum or spin states are rarely (never, in reality) just numbers.

You made no attempt to explain what the two different states in a single ket mean: hint, it's superposition. Never provided even a trivial justification for why normalization is important; where is the actual physics?

Using Rust here is also quite pointless when you're just doing linear algebra... where is the actual benefit over Python or even Haskell?

You've written a very cute and inefficient math library, but calling this QC is just false advertising.

eigenloss commented on What is a ket? How do traits work? Quantum computing in Rust, part 1   walther.guru/blog/impl-qu... · Posted by u/Walther
reallydontask · 6 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation

I remember learning about this at uni in one of the more advanced QM modules.

I remember thinking: Seriously, couldn't they've come up with a better name?

eigenloss · 6 years ago
It's basically a 90-year-old pun involving splitting the word "bracket" into "bra" and "ket".

u/eigenloss

KarmaCake day228April 23, 2018View Original