Ramblings on a long weekend

All of humanity’s teeming questions can be boiled down into four prototypical queries:

 

What is good?

 

What is beautiful?

 

What is just?

 

What is true?

 

This is a pretty complete and comprehensive set, and I do not say this lightly. Nothing can be added or taken away. It is relatively easy to see that adding a new dimension to this foursome is well neigh impossible, because it is invariably superfluous. What takes a little more convincing is that you cannot take away anything either without losing a concept critical to understanding the human condition. In other words, Goodness, Beauty, Justice and Truth are really separate concepts and they can by no means always be conflated.

 

The human pursuits that serve to uncover, understand and preserve these concepts are primordial in nature – namely spirituality, the arts, the justice system and the sciences. If sentient life evolves in some other corner of the universe, independent of the earth, then no matter how weird their language, physiology or technology, that highly developed species will without doubt have these four concepts embedded into their culture. They are inescapable artifacts of every self-reflecting entity.

 

Much of humanity’s misery stem from the inconvenient fact that in numerous cases the above four issues cannot be conflated. In such cases we are really forced to decide on the uncomfortable question – “What is the objective that I want to optimize?”

 

 Do I want to make the world a uniformly good place? In that case perhaps everyone will have to be Mother Teresa. All the intense and often destructive passion that goes into creating breathtaking works of art would be missing. We will all be listening to psalms on our ipods and eating broccoli three times a day.

 

Do I want to make the world a beautiful place? Then we would be constructing Taj Mahals and Great Pyramids in every corner using slave labor, not matter the human cost of the endeavors. Chefs would produce ever so fantastic recipes that would delight and satiate our senses with no regards to the physical and mental toll of the hedonism. Every fireworks show would be brighter than a thousand suns and every bride would be perfection personified.

 

Do I want to make the world a just place? Then we may all end up practicing an eye for an eye, a life for a life without exception. True justice demands a certain symmetry that is brutal and mindless, and gives no regard to beauty or goodness. True justice does not frown upon vengeance, only seeks to cloak it in respectability.

 

And finally, what about the Truth, that beleaguered and much abused quantity? Does the fact that something is true make it desirable without exception? Do I want to make the world a place where the truth trumps every other consideration? Then, if the truth is that boxy gray buildings are the most economical way to provide housing, our cities would be filled with endless rows of such monstrosities. If the truth is that survival of the fittest is the overriding principle of biology, then all our actions would be guided by nothing else that selfishness and self-preservation.

 

 Of course, all these are merely rhetorical questions. What was purposely left missing from my list was that elusive quality called “Balance” – the desire to avoid extreme and one-sided formulations. Balance is not so much a member of the list, as it is the connecting tissue that informs and unifies the four pillars and helps create a solid intellectual platform.

 

There is something to be said of the Greek ideal of the Complete Map – the one who can bravely wield a sword but can also unabashedly cry at a sad story, one who can carry a tune and also tell a joke, one who is a good lover but also a faithful husband and a doting father– in other words, one whose life is balanced in the true sense of the word. The complete man is a not Superman, rather he is the man that lives to the best of his potential and does not betray the possibilities inside him.

 

This idea of the complete man could perhaps be expanded to humanity at large. The complete society would value the arts, but also respect justice. It would strive for goodness but would not be myopic to the truths about nature.  It would allow people many of their idiosyncrasies and beliefs, but would not allow them endanger the wellbeing of innocent bystanders. The complete society would dare, and dare again, to attempt to reach a balance, no matter how difficult and frustrating it happens to be.

The complete society would never be perfect – but it would always believe in the possibility of perfection.

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

Google Buys a Quantum Computer – NYTimes.com

Google Buys a Quantum Computer – NYTimes.com.

Quantum computers are uniquely suited for doing certain types of computations, such as inference on a probabilistic graphical model. For example a spin system or Boltzmann model of N binary variable can be simulated by an N qubit quantum computer in “analog”. In a sense it is not a simulation at all, but the real thing! That is, we set up the system so that the quantum mechanical properties of the physical quantum computer are actually described by exactly the graphical model we are interested in, so that the inferences we want to draw about marginal a-posteriori probabilities are “calculated” by the system in analog – i.e.   by simply letting the system go to equilibrium obeying its quantum mechanical physics.

What this means is that the actual “calculation” is blazingly fast – it is at the speed at which the QC equilibrium occurs. So quantum computer are only really limited by IO – the time needed to load input cubits with apriori probabilities and the time needed to read of aposteriori probabilities  – which are both physical processes that need to couple the quantum computer to traditional silicon based computing.

Quantum computing can solve many types of optimization problems with inherent parallelization, orders of magnitude faster than traditional computing. For example a single QC of a few thousand qubits could replace a traditional cluster with thousands of machines. One tantalizing possibility is to use QC for massive deep learning (deep belief networks) that are as complex as the human brain (or even more so!).

But QC cannot replace traditional computing, because it has no advantage at performing complex sequential tasks. So ultimately QC and traditional computing will co-exist.

I read some where that “a sufficiently advanced technology stack is practically indistinguishable from pure magic”. Every time I read such a story I see how meaningful that statement is! At the same time, we must remember that technological advances like this are triggered by fundamental research in basic sciences like physics, genetics, cell biology. Quantum mechanics was discovered over a century ago, and only now we are able to actual use it as  a technology. I am sure that the work we do today on genetics or gravitation will become technology for future generations. So we need to invest in basic sciences. And we need to dream without inhibition – hyper drives, cloaking devices, immortality … here we come!