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Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing, Complexity, and Creativity

Overview

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Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing, Complexity, and Creativity

Dwarkesh Podcast

2020/11/20
Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Podcast

2020/11/20
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

Scott Aaronson is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center.  He's the author of one of the most interesting blogs on the internet: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ and the book...

Highlights

In this podcast, Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science and director of the Quantum Information Center at UT Austin, discusses his journey from a dissatisfied high school student to a leading figure in quantum computing. He shares insights on the nature of creativity, the limits of human knowledge, and the surprising connections between computational complexity and economics.
00:00
It doesn't take long to become the world's leading expert on a narrow problem
10:45
Teenagerhood is a social construct.
18:20
Only Einstein accomplished three or four breakthroughs.
19:15
Entanglement was a metaphysical puzzle, not a resource.
33:32
Breakthroughs often come from academia's margins.
50:55
A computable universe limits our ability to compute.
53:53
Shor's and Grover's algorithms are basic design motifs of quantum algorithms.
1:03:32
Innovations appear in clusters due to idea collisions.
1:06:23
Markets cannot be expected to find equilibria that require impractical computation.
1:20:32
Some questions may be fundamentally unanswerable.
1:24:07
Sleep is not a luxury, it's a necessity.

Chapters

Intro
00:00
Journey through high school and college
00:33
Early work
12:37
Why quantum computing took so long
19:15
Contributions from outside academia
33:30
Busy beaver function
38:18
New quantum algorithms
53:50
Clusters
1:03:30
Complexity and economics
1:06:23
Creativity
1:13:26
Advice to young people
1:24:07

Transcript

Scott Aaronson: you know, it might take, you know, years or decades to become, you know, an expert, like in a whole field, you know, and you might be very far from that, but it really doesn't take that long to become the world expert on one particular tiny...