The Blog of Scott Aaronson
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Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
More Updates (Oct. 12): Jeffrey Ketchersid has used Claude Code agents to show that BusyBeaver(10) exceeds Graham’s number, beating the previous best result that BB(13) does so. In response t…
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
Updates: Our open letter made the WSJ, and has been tweeted by Matt Yglesias and others. See also Boaz Barak’s thread, and a supportive tweet from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley). If you…
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular scienc…
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum faul…
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having …
Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids. But …
Update (April 14): On the suggestion of my TA Justin Yirka, I gave GPT-4 problem 2 from the final exam, along with its own answers and my and Justin’s grading comments, and asked it whether i…
In the past few months, I’ve twice injured the same ankle while playing with my kids. This, perhaps combined with covid, led me to several indisputable realizations: I am mortal.Despite my se…
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn’t imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is immi…
In Steven Pinker’s guest post from last week, there’s one bit to which I never replied. Steve wrote: After all, in many areas Einstein was no Einstein. You [Scott] above all could speak…
Way back in the covid-filled summer of 2020, I wrote a survey article about the ridiculously-rapidly-growing Busy Beaver function. My survey then expanded to nearly twice its original length, with …
Since I’m a good mood today—at a beautiful science camp with my kids, high in the mountains near Big Bear Lake in California—I thought I’d blog about something positive. Las…