What is Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity?

by Ben Edelman This is the first installment of a three-part series of posts on quantum Hamiltonian complexity based on lectures given by the authors in Boaz and Tselil's seminar. The second installment is here, and the third installment is here. Quantum Hamiltonian complexity is a growing area of study that has important ramifications for … Continue reading What is Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity?

A 1D Area Law for Gapped Local Hamiltonians

(This post is based on part of a lecture delivered by Boriana Gjura and Prayaag Venkat. See also posts by Ben Edelman and Fred Zhang for more context on Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity.) Introduction In this post we present the Area Law conjecture and prove it rigorously, emphasizing the emergence of approximate ground state projectors as … Continue reading A 1D Area Law for Gapped Local Hamiltonians

Algorithmic and Information Theoretic Decoding Thresholds for Low density Parity-Check Code

by Jeremy Dohmann, Vanessa Wong, Venkat Arun Abstract We will discuss error-correcting codes: specifically, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We first describe their construction and information-theoretical decoding thresholds, $latex p_{c}$.  Belief propagation (BP) (see Tom's notes) can be used to decode these. We analyze BP to find the maximum error-rate upto which BP succeeds. After this … Continue reading Algorithmic and Information Theoretic Decoding Thresholds for Low density Parity-Check Code

Ising Perceptron under Gaussian Disorder, and k-NAE-SAT

Blog Post By: Patrick Guo, Vinh-Kha Le, Shyam Narayanan, and David Stoner Methods in statistical physics are known to be extremely useful for understanding certain problems in theoretical computer science. Physical observations can motivate the underlying theoretical models, which in turn explain some of the physical phenomena. This post is based on Professor Nike Sun's … Continue reading Ising Perceptron under Gaussian Disorder, and k-NAE-SAT

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

Approximating Partition Functions

[Guest post by Alex Kelser, Alex Lin, Amil Merchant, and Suproteem Sarkar, scribing for a lecture by Andrej Risteski.] Andrej Risteski: Approximating Partition Functions via Variational Methods and Taylor Series For a probability distribution defined up to a constant of proportionality, we have already seen the partition function. To refresh your memory, given a probability … Continue reading Approximating Partition Functions