Two books that I highly recommend to give you a visual and numbers view of the cell:
“The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell is full of illustrations like the ones show in the article and really gave me a sense of what k might imagine when reading about the cell.
“Cell Biology by the Numbers” by Ron Milo and Rob Philips is full of order of magnitude calculations of about the processes of the cell. How fast are they, over what distance, how much, etc.
Agree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is similar in that foundations of math makes an appearance. The other is “The Weyl Conjectures” by Karen Olson, which captures what it’s like to really do mathematics. Highly recommend both.
For 2, I don’t think you can break ties however you like because this would give you random left or right associativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_associativity For example 2-4-7 would be either (2-4)-7 or 2-(4-7), depending on how you broke the tie.
When I was a high school student, I read “Artificial Life” by Stephen Levy and got really into alife. The book had snapshots of a daughter of Codd’s CA, Langston’s loops, on its book sleeve. I was able to back up some of the rules and then deduce what the others were to repro this CA. I still chase that feeling I got from doing this.
“Gil Kalai #23: So we’re perfectly clear, from my perspective your position has become like that of Saddam Hussein’s information minister, who repeatedly went on TV to explain how Iraq was winning the war even as American tanks rolled into Baghdad. I.e., you are writing to us from an increasingly remote parallel universe.
The smooth exponential falloff of circuit fidelity with the number of gates has by now been seen in separate experiments from Google, IBM, Quantinuum, QuEra, USTC, and probably others I’m forgetting right now. Yes, IBM’s gate fidelity is a little lower than Google’s, but the exponential falloff pattern is the same.
And, far from being “statistically unreasonable,” this exponential falloff is precisely what the simplest model of the situation (i.e., independent depolarizing noise on each qubit) would predict. You didn’t predict it, because you started from the axiom that quantum error-correction had to fail somehow—but the rest of us, who didn’t start from that axiom, did predict it!”
>That's an EXTRAORDINARY claim and one that contradicts the experience of pretty much all other research and development in quantum error correction over the course of the history of quantum computing.
Not sure why you would say that? This sort of exponential suppression of errors is exactly how quantum error correction works and why we think quantum computing is viable. Source: have worked on quantum error correction for a couple of decades. Disclosure: I work on the team that did this experiment. More reading: lecture notes from back in the day explaining this exponential suppression https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse599d/06wi/lectu...
Maybe I’m the exception but I went maybe 30 or 40 times. There was so much joy in sharing my childhood with my child. Also the small gift shop had someone who knew their obscure technology history book, I must have bought 10 books from that shop.
There was a world before the dot com explosion when tinkering with computers was odd, a passion that gripped few, and was looked upon as extremely odd by most. This museum was the closest thing to being able to travel back to that era. You could plop yourself down at a Xerox Alto and hack away to your heart's content. Being able to share this experience with my son is something I will always remember about this museum.
A sad day for computing, and a sad day for Seattle.
Please be gentle on my poor digital ocean droplet :) Note that these notes were not published and were probably something he typed up while thinking about the subject. If you haven’t, I highly recommend checking out one of his “it from bit” papers, they are actually kind of wild https://philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ.pdf
These are notes he typed up, maybe for himself and maybe to share with others. Doing this is a highly effective way to clarify your own thinking. Most of his ideas are listed are mundane, but others, like where he predicts something like quantum computers years before that became apparent are pretty cool to see.
I didn’t say the runtime did I? The approximation ratio went from exponential to polynomial noise ratio. This just went from 2^n to n^4.5 and everyone seems to say “oh this is fine”.
People seemed to be focusing on the fact that this wouldn’t break the NIST leading PQC public key cryptosystem, but I think that misses the point. This takes a problem at the core of this security, which previously only had an exponential approximation, and finds a polynomial approximation. Sure that polynomial is too high O(n^4.5) to break the leading proposed systems, but I mean are you really feeling safe when an exponential just changed to a polynomial?
An analogy would be something like this. Factoring is hard. We base RSA on the hardness of this problem and there we use numbers that are the product of two primes. Someone just found an algorithm that doesn’t work to find the product of two primes, but can take a product of four primes and return two products of two primes. Do you feel safe with RSA?
Anyway the paper could be wrong or it could be right, it will take a while for those in the field to dig through this. As a cautionary tale, there have been a few extra good quantum people who have proposed quantum attacks on lattice problems that have later been shown to have bugs.
My favorite Serra story is when he was hired to build a sculpture by Caltech. In typical fashion he decided he wanted to build a giant wall across one of the few remaining wide open green spaces on campus, the lawn adjacent to Beckman. In a nod to Caltech he called it “Vectors”.
The students were not happy. This was great lawn to just lay out, play frisbee, etc. A few days after this blew up in the student news, a large wall showed up right in front of the main coffee shop, the Red Door. That was a nice space with beautiful trees and tables (ah, the Southern California weather). The wall was right in the middle of this and blocked off the thoroughfare. The wall was called “Eigenvectors” and that word was painted on it, along with a ton of other linear algebra formulas. I remember walking by and going “holy shit is that the Moore-Penrose inverse?!” In the end the students won, the sculpture was never built.
"The Weil Conjectures" by Karen Olsson is an interesting read that connects Andre and Simone and the authors own experiences as a math major. I thought it did a good job capture the appeal of math, but it's definitely not about the conjectures or their proof.
“The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell is full of illustrations like the ones show in the article and really gave me a sense of what k might imagine when reading about the cell.
“Cell Biology by the Numbers” by Ron Milo and Rob Philips is full of order of magnitude calculations of about the processes of the cell. How fast are they, over what distance, how much, etc.