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by jeeceebees
2458 days ago
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I think your camera example is a false equivalence that makes this seem as if it's not a computation. The camera is not running the same algorithm as the renderer and so you're comparing different things. The experiment used a classical computer to randomly generate a circuit C, told the quantum computer to execute it, and recorded the result. Then they repeated this but executed each circuit in the most optimal way a classical computer can. Finally they compared the distributions to verify that the quantum computer's results matched the correct classically computed results. This proves that the quantum computer is able to generate that distribution faster than a classical computer and isn't just doing some other spurious process that happens to be faster. Yes, this random distribution isn't very useful and so this result is only really interesting as an experimental verification of theory. However, it is a computation that benefits from quantum speedup in real life! Hopefully soon, algorithms will be found to generate more useful distributions (as it seems for the time being sampling is the only application of this type of QC that is practically doable). For example, Aaronson mentions that generating verifiably random bits is not much more difficult than the noise generated in this experiment and could have an impact in a variety of cryptographic applications. |
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[rewriting your words] The experiment used a classical computer to randomly generate a scene C, set that scene up in real life, and recorded the result. Then they repeated this but rendered the scene in the most optimal way a classical computer can. Finally they compared the results to verify that the scene in real life matched the correct classically computed results.
The scene + digital camera has the exact same role (and proof value) in my hypothetical experiment as the quantum computer + measurement device does in the Google experiment.
It's not the camera that "contains the circuit", it's the scene and the camera together that computes the same values (exactly, as it turns out) as the classically computed rendering algorithm of the same phenomena.
Call it "camera computing", write a paper in Nature, win Turing award. The hard part with camera computing is the same: How to map a computation onto the generated scene so that the measurement device (camera) gets a meaningful result faster than it can be simulated in the computer.
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Look, I've worked on things for a long time only to discover in the end that there's nothing there. It sucks, I get it. Move on, try something else. There's nothing here.