Monthly Archives: October 2019

The story of Poincaré and his friend the baker

Posted on October 13, 2019 by

Google’s supremacy stone soup Here is a little update on the Google supremacy claims that we discussed in this earlier post (see especially this remark). Don’t miss our previous post on combinatorics. Recall that a quantum supremacy demonstration would be … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Probability, Quantum, Statistics | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Gérard Cornuéjols’s baker’s eighteen 5000 dollars conjectures

Posted on October 13, 2019 by

Gérard Cornuéjols Gérard Cornuéjols‘s beautiful (and freely available) book from 2000 Optimization: Packing and Covering is about an important area of combinatorics which is lovely described in the preface to the book The integer programming models known as set packing … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Open problems | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Noisy quantum circuits: how do we know that we have robust experimental outcomes at all? (And do we care?)

Posted on October 3, 2019 by

In a recent post we discussed Google’s claim of achieving “quantum supremacy” and my reasons to think that these claims will not stand. (See also this comment for necessary requirements from a quantum supremacy experiment.) This debate gives a good … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science and Optimization, Quantum | Tagged , , | 9 Comments