Efficient preparation of thermal states of quantum systems: natural or artificial

Cross-posted from https://wsmoses.com/blog/2018/12/18/boaz/Lecturer: Aram HarrowScribes: Sinho Chewi, William S. Moses, Tasha Schoenstein, Ary SwaminathanNovember 9, 2018OutlineSampling from thermal states was one of the first and (initially) most important uses of computers. In this blog post, we will discuss both classical and quantum Gibbs distributions, also known as thermal equilibrium states. We will then discuss Markov chains … Continue reading Efficient preparation of thermal states of quantum systems: natural or artificial

Theory Blog Aggregator Up!

The Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator is now back online at a new website: http://cstheory-feed.org/ . There is also a twitter feed at https://twitter.com/cstheory . See this blog post by Suresh Venkatasubramanian (who, together with Arnab Bhattacharyya, is responsible for the aggregator's revival - thank you!!) for more details. This is a good opportunity to … Continue reading Theory Blog Aggregator Up!

Highlights beyond EC: Call for nominations

[Guest post by Moshe Babaioff --Boaz] "Highlights Beyond EC" Session at EC 2019: Call for Nominations Committee: Mohammad Akbarpour, Moshe Babaioff, Shengwu Li and Ariel Procaccia Following a new tradition started last year, the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’19) will host a special session highlighting some of the best work in economics … Continue reading Highlights beyond EC: Call for nominations

HALG 2019 Call for nominations

[Guest post by Piotr Sankowski --Boaz] Call for Nominations - 4th Highlights of Algorithms conference (HALG 2019) Copenhagen, June 14-16, 2019 http://www.halgdiku.dk/ The HALG 2019 conference seeks high-quality nominations for invited talks that will highlight recent advances in algorithmic research. Similarly to previous years, there are two categories of invited talks: A. survey (60 minutes): a … Continue reading HALG 2019 Call for nominations

FOCS early registration deadline

[Message from Adi Rosen --Boaz] This is a kind reminder that the deadline for the early rate registration fees for FOCS 2018 is this Sunday, September 9, 2018. =================================== FOCS 2018 - Second Call for Participation =================================== https://www.irif.fr/~focs2018/ The 59th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2018) will take place in Paris, France, … Continue reading FOCS early registration deadline

Black holes, paradoxes, and computational complexity

(Thanks so much to Scott Aaronson for giving me many pointers, insights, explanations, and corrections that greatly improved this post. As I'm a beginner to physics, the standard caveat holds doubly here: Scott is by no means responsible to any of my remaining technical mistakes and philosophical misconceptions.) One of the interesting features of physics … Continue reading Black holes, paradoxes, and computational complexity