D-Wave principal Geordie Rose makes 3 predictions.

[GreyGeek]

They start at 16:00 minutes.

I tend to agree that most of the brains in the IT industry are wasting their time on crap like Facebook and Twitter....

[lcorken]

That is "way out there stuff". As was a computer in the average home was less than 100 years ago or a computer in the palm of your hand less than 30 years ago. Makes me wonder what humanity could do if we could all work together instead of fight and try to kill each other, corporate greed stomp-the-competition kind of thing.

Ken.

[MoonRise]

...... Makes me wonder what humanity could do if we could all work together instead of fight and try to kill each other, corporate greed stomp-the-competition kind of thing.

Ken.

+1

[Voytas]

Wow!

[SteveRiley]

I was surprised to hear what D-Wave's goal is. Rose sets up his argument with a curious analogy. He explains that an airplane isn't a faster horse -- indeed, the first airplane was slower than a horse -- because the airplane can operate in a third dimension. "A horse will never fly." (Funny -- we intuitively understand that using the Z axis lets us build up a lot more speed; he actually doesn't need to explain that.) Similarly, we're told, a quantum computer ("many" actually becomes "two" during his talk) has access to "new resources...parallel universes" to do something different, although right now they aren't too powerful. OK, that's a little weird, but quantum is supposed to be weird I guess. So -- back to the goal, which Rose states is to "apply this machine to an area that I think is fundamentally important, it's the crux of our future as humans." What, exactly, is that crux? To "build machines like us."

What? Humans are evolutionary accidents, marred by flaws and are generally selfish bastards. I really, really don't want my computer to be like any kind of human!

Oh wait -- he actually means intelligent machines, presumably machines that are capable of learning. I would recommend he quit appealing to anthropomorphism in explaining his goal. But he just can't. Rose shows us a photograph of two D-Wave computers and tells us about the "fridge" inside each one. The fridge has a pulse tube that "emits a sound roughly once per second, which sounds eerily like a heartbeat." Furthermore, "to stand next to one of these machines...feels like an altar to an alien god." Uh...really? That's straight up purple prose, not a useful technical overview.

Blaming the lack of an adequate language, he describes a qubit as a "nexus, a point in space where [two parallel universes] overlap." Each time you add a new qubit, "you double the number of parallel universes you have access to." He shows a photograph of a chip with 2^500 qubits, which we presume must be the harnessing of an unimaginable number of parallel universes in a space "the size of your thumbnail." What's it good for? "The shadows of these parallel worlds overlap with ours, and...we can dive into them and grab their resources and pull them back into ours."

Come on. Surely there are better ways to explain quantum computing. Mr. Rose, I think, has been huffing too much of his own exhaust. The best part? A freudian slip in his third prediction: "Humanity is on the cusp of the most important technological, societal revelatio-- revolution that's ever occurred" (LOL!) defined as "machines that outpace humans in everything."

That video was the ramblings of someone with a god complex eager to build a better god. Or someone in the middle of a major LSD trip.

[lcorken]

Yes, I have a tough time swallowing this parallel universe stuff. But, who knows?

That video was the ramblings of someone with a god complex eager to build a better god. Or someone in the middle of a major LSD trip.

Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were researching a connection between LSD and a cosmic consciousness (God?). That may make Leary's Imprisonment an act of religious persecution. Alpert's book "Be here now" is a good read.
I only dropped twice back in the 70s. So I can’t claim I experienced the connection. Definitely weird stuff though.

Ken.

[GreyGeek]

.... So -- back to the goal, which Rose states is to "apply this machine to an area that I think is fundamentally important, it's the crux of our future as humans." What, exactly, is that crux? To "build machines like us.".... Oh wait -- he actually means intelligent machines, presumably machines that are capable of learning. .....

Since "intelligence" hasn't yet been adequately defined it would be hard to build an "intelligent" machine. We are constantly spending big bucks to try to find evidence of evolution and/or intelligent life in space but fail to see more than adequate examples here on our own planet ... Apes, Elephants, Whales and Dolphins, even if we ignore dogs, cats and other animals.

Blaming the lack of an adequate language, he describes a qubit as a "nexus, a point in space where [two parallel universes] overlap." Each time you add a new qubit, "you double the number of parallel universes you have access to." He shows a photograph of a chip with 2^500 qubits, which we presume must be the harnessing of an unimaginable number of parallel universes in a space "the size of your thumbnail." What's it good for? "The shadows of these parallel worlds overlap with ours, and...we can dive into them and grab their resources and pull them back into ours."

Come on. Surely there are better ways to explain quantum computing. Mr. Rose, I think, has been huffing too much of his own exhaust. The best part? A freudian slip in his third prediction: "Humanity is on the cusp of the most important technological, societal revelatio-- revolution that's ever occurred" (LOL!) defined as "machines that outpace humans in everything."
'''

I found his choice of words peculiar, as well as his theoretical explanations for how quantum computing works. The D-Wave machine isn't a true quantum computer. It uses quantum annealing. Their latest machine, the 512 cubit device, uses adibatic quantum computing. Neither can pass the the Schor Algorithm, which tests the validity of a quantum computer by computing the prime factors of an integer. As an aside:

If a quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits could operate without succumbing to noise and other quantum decoherence phenomena, Shor's algorithm could be used to break public-key cryptography schemes such as the widely used RSA scheme. RSA is based on the assumption that factoring large numbers is computationally infeasible. So far as is known, this assumption is valid for classical (non-quantum) computers; no classical algorithm is known that can factor in polynomial time. However, Shor's algorithm shows that factoring is efficient on an ideal quantum computer, so it may be feasible to defeat RSA by constructing a large quantum computer.

Tinfoil at the ready: One could surmise that the D-Wave has indeed passed the Schor test and Lockheed's machine actually went to the NSA, but the NSA is suppressing that bit of knowledge.

The idea that a quantum computer works by evoking M-Brane theory and claiming it dips into other multiverses to extract necessary information is ludicrous. As a natural process that would require a decrease in the Entropy of our Universe (because it increases our knowledge), which cannot happen spontaneously, according Shannon's application of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. The behavior of quantum computers is well explained by the Schrodinger Equation. Read the section on "The time-independent Schrödinger equation", and quantum tunneling, which bring up my last point:

Where did we get that (equation) from? Nowhere. It is not possible to derive it from anything you know. It came out of the mind of Schrödinger.	”
—Richard Feynman

Which gives rise to my weird idea: the human brain is an organic quantum computer. Creativity, inspiration, simultaneous thoughts, premonitions, etc...

This idea arose while I was watching a video of a presentation by the project leader in HP's Memristor lab, which I posted in another thread. In it he describes another device, a Memistor (no "r") and how it is a three terminal device, instead of two, like the Memristor. The Memistor has been used to create electronic devices controlled by neural network software. HP's guy modified it to use both Memristors and Memistors to create 10,000 "neurons" (IIRC).

[Snowhog]

Which gives rise to my weird idea: the human brain is an organic quantum computer.

Not a weird idea at all. The human mind remains the true, last, incompletely explored frontier. What it is fully capable of is still largely unknown.

[woodsmoke]

The whole thing about Leary and connecting with God using LSD was bogus to me for a reason that nobody ever thought to ask, at least that I ever saw.

A) If "God" has any relation to " a being " that was either benevolent or not...then, why would "God" have waited aeons (if one goes along with evolution(God's working through it) or ten thousand years...to "bestow" on humankind the discovery of LSD....and have condemned untold trillions of humans to death without "really" "knowing" God so that they could not, perforce, "come to God an "have salvation"... ..in other words, if "humankind" was "supposed" to "find God" with LSD then he/she let a lot of people burn in hell for no apparent reason.

B) If "God" is a "neutral" "thing/force/whatever" then. there is nothing to "find" in "God" with the newly discovered pathway...that of LSD.. one might conceiveably "experience" God, but not "find" God in this scenario.

And, since there is no "motive force" the finding of LSD was and it's connection to "God" was a totally random thing, and again, of no "use" so why even go to the trouble to do it except to feed the ego of the guy promoting it.

C) And given Leary's penchant for wearing a white robe, sandals, and a beard that looked remarkably like the WASP/Catholic version of Jesus then he was at least "hinting" at a "person/"God""...

in any case, the whole thing did not stand on the merits

just my thoughts of little worth.

woodsmoke

[lcorken]

Woodsmoke, I can't really argue any of that. Just saying, Leary, Alpert and others believed there was some kind of enlightenment that was hard to explain. Alpert did a sort of "walk-about" in India and found that meditation was a better path to enlightenment, hence, Be here now, or live in the moment.

I don't believe God (if there is one) would send people to Hell to suffer forever. I think Hell is a fabrication of religions that is used to control and manipulate people using fear.

I put this Nexus and Parallel Universe stuff rite up there with Sasquatch, UFOs, Alien Abductions and the like. I don't really believe any of that but won't remove anything from the realm of possibility.

Ken.

[SteveRiley]

While the specific video here isn't a TED talk, I have quit watching TED and TED-style talks generally because they've really turned into an echo chamber. Now if they bring back Harris and Dawkins and Dennet (alas, no more Hitchens), I might take a look at those.

[GreyGeek]

Hitchens I enjoyed. Didn't always agree with him but he was very interesting.

[jlittle]

I put this Nexus and Parallel Universe stuff rite up there with Sasquatch, UFOs, Alien Abductions and the like.

I agree. Intuitively, the parallel universe concept violates Occam's Razor, in that entities are multiplied at a scale of the astronomical divided by the quantum (mind-bogglingly large divided by the incredibly small).

As a theist, I see an anti-theist prejudice, a dislike of the idea that things might be inexplicably the way they are.

[GreyGeek]

I agree. Intuitively, the parallel universe concept violates Occam's Razor, in that entities are multiplied at a scale of the astronomical divided by the quantum (mind-bogglingly large divided by the incredibly small).

As a theist, I see an anti-theist prejudice, a dislike of the idea that things might be inexplicably the way they are.

It violates more than that. In 2007 Eugene Koonin published an article in "Biology Direct" entitled "The Cosmological Model of Eternal Inflation and the Transition from Chance to Biological Evolution in the History of Life" in which he postulates the "Many Worlds In One" concept, which was made popular by Stepehn Hawkins when Hawkins announced that the M-Brane version of the String Theory, with its similar multi-universe postulation which he claimed explains away the need for a Creator to explain how proteins and enzymes evolved from amino acid soups. The simplest proteins are at least 150 amino acids long, and even the smallest enzymes require folded proteins to work properly. To make those enzymes or proteins requires DNA and RNA. In our universe the probabilistic resources are insufficient to allow for the evolution of proteins and enzymes from pre-biotic soup. Even the "RNA World" fails. Hence the need for a larger, INFINATE probabilistic space. The need for such a construct arises because inflationary cosmology has to explain homogeneity and flatness A homogeneous universe is considered flat if it is balanced between eventual gravitational collapse and eternal expansion. Since our actual mass density/critical mass density is just under one, our universe will keep on expanding and space has hardly any overall curvature. This horizon and flatness requires a fine tuning of Entropy to an accuracy of one part in 10exp(10exp(123)). This is what is meant when referring to the "probabilistic resources" of the Universe.

Inflationary cosmology and its children, the multi-verses created by necessity in the formulation of the M-Brane theory, which was designed specifically to create a probabilistic pool large enough (actually infinite) to allow for the chance appearance of a protein with more than 150 amino acids, and thus to eliminate the need for a Creator, which Hawkins triumphantly declared in 2010 does not exist. The problem is that M-Brane theory, once permitted as a possible explanation for anything, destroys practical and scientific reasoning about everything. It can explain the origin of ALL events, no matter how improbable, by reference to chance because of the infinite probabilistic resources it purports to generate. Even worse, Inflationary cosmology actually impliess that certain explanations that we regard as extremely improbable are actually more likely to be true than explanations we ordinaryily accept. Look up "Boltzmann's Brain". Under conditions of the multi-verse it is theoretically possible for a fully functional human brain to pop into existance due to thermal fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. Some M-Brane models give rise to occurances of Boltzmann’s brain out numbering normal brains. The mulit-verse proves anything and therefore proves nothing. It is an absurdity.

[woodsmoke]

Ya know GG....... lol

woodsmoke