Quantum . Quantum Summer School Wk 2

So…

• I had applied for a Quantum Summer school and thought I didn’t get in, but as it turns out, my Congrats email went to my spam. So apparently I’m doing a quantum school virtually while physically being in another one, which is very meta, as I was told by a friend. Simultaneously hilarious. But the times usually work out okay (so far).
• The online one is taught by more physicists, with some theory and computation. So we are using QuTip and Qiskit and I have peers who work on nanoscale things and spectroscopy and throw around words like “quantum state tomography”. Our special session is on error-correcting codes, but the focus is on more quantum-related stuff (general foundational theory, some programming).
• The summer-school in-person is a mix of everyone from Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, but on the Computer Science side, seems to have people who are more into things like Complexity Theory (which makes sense). And most tend to be researchers or just got into grad school for Quantum Computing (if they are undergrads), or who are postdocs or professors. There is a range of persons from those interested in quantum information processing, quantum signal processing, quantum (and post-quantum) cryptography, quantum algorithms (and complexity), etc. It seems like they all went to QIP or something like that. And then there are also a handful of us who are Number Theorists! Yay for us!
• Both are interesting, and people have flown all over the world for the latter. My roommate, for example, is from Paris, versus the online version, which is focused on US-based schools, although the sessions do have participants originally from countries as far as Taiwan and Australia.

This week

• This week, we focused a lot more on Quantum Algorithms and some cryptography and some error-correcting codes, which is totally my jam. So I went from the Kochen-Specker theorem to block encoding of Lindblad generators in the same day. Fortunately, Ewin has the most beautiful notation (I didn’t say handwriting!), which made it reasonable to follow along.
• There was a lecture involving Minicrypt and PKE / OWFs, and then Nicolas gave a talk on Quantum LDPC codes after that session to a particular eager lady in a green dress who seemed to know quite a lot about quantum LDPC codes.
• I only know a little bit about LDPC in the classical sense (our coaching was from our PI and a particular book that served him during his PhD study, that I have been combing through, as well as the examples we worked through together), and the tiniest bit about the kinds of graphs used in the quantum setting, and the manner in which we are investigating LDPC is a very specific case that is more number-theoretic, so it was interesting to hear about the topic and follow up with some resources. There was a lot of buzz over rotated surface codes; our group had a lot of questions, but it was also fascinating to hear about planar cellulation (think projective planes), which was cited as the most popularly used method and seemed fascinating from a projection-standpoint. I immediately began thinking about matroids and my general graph theory classes (I have taken about five at this point).
• There was a talk by Scott on Verifiable Quantum Supremacy, which started from the idea of sampling-from distribution. One of the interesting analogies was that one could sample a general problem and get “fast” results, but these may not necessarily be useful. It reminded me of a researcher I am working with who asked me early on “what is accuracy?”, and how specifically there were questions in AI technologies (think LLMs) that would do “okay” (50% right) because they were similar or generic enough for completion, but where a model could fail a particular, specific type of problem. So in terms of an assessment of performance, is scoring a high mark on the same kind of problem (“this one trick!”) evaluated similarly to bombing certain types of questions that say, an LLM just struggles to solve?

Anyways

• A bunch of us are going hiking and watching “Barbie” later this week! We had a dinner tonight, where each table had questions from past years, some of which were taken from Putnam. We actually sat down and chatted about a few on our table, and we think we got a couple done. The one I liked is one in which there are 100 persons boarding a plane, and one person drops their boarding pass and decides to sit in a random seat unless someone informs them that is their seat. And this happens for everyone who continues and finds that their assigned seat has been taken, and the question asks the probability of yourself sitting in your assigned seat.

Here are some photos

• The first question, not entirely botched my interpretation. There were a number of these on each table. Also, there is supposedly going to be an estimathon by the person who invented it sometime later this week! I have played this at the Jane Street Symposium, (and a couple similar events they have hosted I have been invited to), so I’m interested in this!

• Scott talking about Sampling-Based Quantum Experiments. He’s not as intimidating as on social media (people are generally more serious and more scary online!), and also does AI Safety. It was easy to just walk right up to him at this event.
• Just when you thought you wouldn’t run into any of those AI people (lol). Plato’s cave where are you when you are needed!?

• I loved this photo from Nicolas’s slides on projecting an expander graph onto a quantum computer. Great.

• I think this was from this morning.

• The panel on Rehumanizing Mathematics and a book I need to read that seems to have analogies to Mathematics.

• I sent my advisor a photo of these as I was walking home.

• They are everywhere at Maths conferences!

• Instead of taking the bus, a group of us walks down to the conference centre each morning, about a 20 minute walk.

• Spoilers (sorry!) Grabbing a quick bite before seeing Barbie. I actually didn’t enjoy this one as much as I’d like, and preferred Oppenheimer, which I guess makes me one of a minority of persons, or maybe too brainwashed by film-art or something lol. I liked the Eilish song at the end, but even preferred the music in Oppenheimer, and the script, although the clothes were beautiful in Barbie. There were also a lot more females in the crew (but still an all-make rigging crew..go figure!), which I super appreciated. Things seem to be changing, albeit slowly (I did notice that it might be the case that a bunch of people retired or left the biz either during the quarantine or just after, too). I realize I may not be the audience for Barbie, though (tomboy all the way). Also, I wanted Jake / Ken to commit to being a bad guy. Strauss was a great, solid, committed bad guy and I loved him in his part. He was sooo good and such a believable villain!

• Nice walkable areas. I’ve really been enjoying the hiking here, although the altitude definitely takes getting used to. I’ve been opting for easier hikes because I don’t want to underestimate the effects of the altitude, being from an island. Also, Happy Anniversary parents! Got to chat with them a bit today!

Oh

• I might have mentioned that last year, I was part of this Quantum book club and was one of the persons who stuck it out, and was also involved in another one this year, and a hackathon, and another course, all outside of my university! So they’re starting a Quantum Field Theory book club (they already picked the book) so I decided to try that as well. I heard the field is rough, but there is no better group to start it with. And yes, I know it doesn’t have to do with Quantum computing lol. I loved Physics growing up (I studied Physics, Mathematics and Art), and some of the stuff from the first chapter Taylor covered in his Algebra 4 class (ie. the Einstein summation convention). Other stuff like Lorentz covariants and invariants are covered in the first chapter. So we’ll see. I really like this group, though! Worst case I bomb out but learn something!
• Oh yeah, I’ve been doing Lean on the evenings, of course. Definitely haven’t stopped doing that! Also, I got into a Fall school for it (Formal Methods!), so if I can wrangle travel and all of that, I definitely plan on going! It’s all happening!

And that’s it!