Zelinsky Says News Today

Update (April 19): Apparently a bug has been found, and the author has withdrawn the claim (see the comments). For those who don't yet know from their other social media: a week ago the cryptographer Yilei Chen posted a preprint, eprint.iacr.org/2024/555, claiming to give a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve lattice problems. For example, it…

[By prior agreement, this post will be cross-posted on Microsoft's Q# blog, even though it has nothing to do with the Q# programming language.  It does, however, contain many examples that might be fun to implement in Q#!] Why should Nature have been quantum-mechanical?  It's totally unclear what would count as an answer to such…

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.  Today, I'm proud to announce that Adam Yedidia, a PhD student at MIT (but an MEng student when he did most of this work),…

Richard Borcherds is a British mathematician at Berkeley, who won the 1998 Fields Medal for the proof of the monstrous moonshine conjecture among many other contributions. A couple months ago, Borcherds posted on YouTube a self-described “rant” about quantum computing, which was recently making the rounds on Facebook and which I found highly entertaining. Borcherds points out that the term “quantum supremacy” means only that quantum computers can outperform existing classical computer...