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Comment by _game_of_life | Hacker News Reader

I stopped listening to anything from quanta magazine after this video:

Where they claim that that a "landmark proof" and one of the greatest accomplishments in computer science of 2020 solved THE HALTING PROBLEM using "a quantum AI supercomputer."

I looked up the proof and that's not even remotely what the authors paper seems to be talking about...

Not to mention you'd both win the Turing award and have it renamed after you if you solved the halting problem.

So I guess my question is: Is quanta magazine reputable or just more science clickbait? I'm curious what the hacker News audience thinks since I am definitely not a quantum physicist.

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That video segment never mentions "AI", and it never says that the halting problem has been solved -- it explicitly says it's unsolvable. What it says is that solutions to the halting problem could be verified under a certain computational model.

That's obviously an extremely rough summary of what the paper shows, but I'm not sure how one could do better in a 3-minute summary for a non-expert audience. And based on Scott Aaronson's response to the paper, it seems like calling it a "landmark" result is very reasonable:

> Still, assuming this one stands (as I’m guessing it will), I regard it as easily one of the biggest complexity-theoretic (and indeed computability-theoretic!) surprises so far in this century. Huge congratulations to the authors on what looks to be a historic achievement.

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4512

Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to correct me.

I looked at some articles from quanta on mathematics I am more familiar with and they were pretty good so I definitely misjudged them.

It's just getting so hard to figure out what's sensationalist and what is not these days.

I’ve read a few Quanta articles about topics in pure math, and they did about as good of a job as one could reasonably expect. E.g. they interviewed roughly the same people I would have chosen, and the author clearly spent a great deal of time trying to make the work accessible without saying anything untrue or misleading. Of course, there’s a certain amount of hype that tends to be a matter of opinion.

Here’s an example close to my heart: https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-find-polynomia...

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