Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem | Hacker News Reader

Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem

quantamagazine.org

267 pointsdigital5524 comments

Here's a talk of the scientist explaining her work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQGW4KcLMIQ

wow. she has so much poise for her age. I'm sure she will go far.

she's extremely far already imho, if she solved a fundamental problem, as this is more meaningful than what 99.99% of people achieve

"Classical Verification of Quantum Computations" Mahadev. (2018)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01082

https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1804.01082/

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10138991277567750...

I am surprised she was given credit. A very impressive act by her supervisor.

Honesty is 'very impressive'?

My masters' thesis supervisor took my thesis and submitted it to a well known journal and a couple of other conferences with himself as the first author and me as the second. I had defended my thesis and started work and did not have the time/motivation to write it out for the journals/conferences. He selected portions of my thesis, formatted them for the journal, and submitted it. I was too uninterested and busy to pursue the matter any further and just let it be.

So yes, given that stuff like that happens, I do find it impressive.

i'm not sure what is wrong with this. Normally, it's done the other way around, IE you write the papers, publish them, and then write the thesis (whose copyright ends up being owned by some random monopoly company in the midwest). But, you got your name on the paper, and your supervisor, who almost certainly had scientific and funding input to your research, was rightfully coauthor.

I wasn't funded by him. I was on a scholarship and then on a TA, and was funded by the department.

I think if you truly cared about this, didn't mind trashing your reputation, and had proof of your copyright at the time the faculty member did this, you could write a letter to your dean (with backing data) as well as the journal. The journal will retract the paper (otherwise it's plagiarism) and the dean will have a chat with the faculty member. However, there are many risks associated with this strategy and it could backfire without fixing anything. In a normal program, the thesis advisor and you have a close relationship and you would submit papers together, voluntarily.

You also didn't seem to do any of the effort to publish the paper or follow up with it. Of course your adviser should be the corresponding author. They actually care about the paper and getting response to it.

First author should be the person who did the work, that’s pretty strandard. Corresponding author doesn’t always need to be first author.

Honestly this does sound pretty terrible. The student doesn’t have to publish, and you don’t get to misrepresent yourself as first author if they don’t want to.

Really really want to be first author, redo the work yourself. That’s the only way you can claim credit (and responsibility) for having done the work.

Yes. I know it varies a bit by field, but a large percentage of the time the supervisor claims credit for everything their graduate students comes up with. There have been more than a few Nobel prizes awarded to supervisors where the student came up with the idea and did all the work.

Edit. A famous example is Selman Waksman and Albert Schatz [0, 1].

0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1882032

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selman_Waksman

I think it varies more than a "bit" by field. I would say it's extremely uncommon in math and theoretical cs.

Neither of these fields award Nobel prizes :)

More seriously, maths (I don't know much about the theoretical cs field) is a bit of an anomaly in this respect compared to most of the sciences.

The problem seems to be worse the more money you need to do your research - maybe this is why maths excapes the usual feudal hierarchy where the lord own everything including their serfs ideas.

The story I've heard is that Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician, hence, no prize for that field.

Urban myth:

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/10/the-reason-t...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-prizes-rite/

https://www.quora.com/What-facts-are-often-presented-to-you-...

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/node50.html

Does any one have a good intro paper on quantum computing?

John Preskill's interview here is a good place to start for the high level https://blog.ycombinator.com/john-preskill-on-quantum-comput....

Scott Aaronson's lecture notes are also great https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3943.

I like the Nielsen book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computation_and_Quantu...)

https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0261

Excellent introduction if you're a Computer Scientist:

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9809016

https://www.infoq.com/articles/quantum-computing-intro-one

I'm just a baby computer scientists but when I was reading the title I immediately thought "no way that is possible in general" which is I suppose why it is a good paper.

good ideas can often seem pretty crazy.

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