A recommendation is in the domain of subjectivity, meaning that there is no consensus on the correctness... so, even if the algorithm is faster, its usefulness shouldn't be superior to a random pick based on some matching criteria... which is already as fast as it can be
"Tang skipped the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades in order to enroll at the University of Texas at Austin at the age of 14."
Oh wow, that is either insanely cool, or a huge loss. At my university, there were so many great parties that I feel like you'd be seriously left out of everything social going on if you're underage when joining.
Hey Ms. Tang, here's a little weekend project for you. There's this thing called Transformers and GenAI. The problem is, it doesn't scale. Propose a better architecture and call it AGI.
Relevant reading: "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an
8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog" by Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus [0].
Shows in a humorous way how the vast majority of quantum computing "records" are utter nonsense based on simplifying the factorization so far, that it turns into a problem on the difficulty level of "factorize 9" - _before_ running the experiment.
Journalists however tend to lack the knowledge to accurately represent that, resulting in nonsensical record claims.
Very hot take but this result made me believe that BQP and P might be equivalent computational classes (in other words, quantum computers might not offer any computational complexity speedups at all). I found out about this result in college and implemented the algorithm described in the paper for a class project, though I don't remember the code working very well haha
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 28.4 ms ] threadhttps://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-true-promise-of-q...
Edit: in light of a couple comments here I would like to say the podcast interview with Tang was this year. (May 3, 2025)
https://ewintang.com/assets/tang_thesis.pdf
Oh wow, that is either insanely cool, or a huge loss. At my university, there were so many great parties that I feel like you'd be seriously left out of everything social going on if you're underage when joining.
(Fingers crossed)
Shows in a humorous way how the vast majority of quantum computing "records" are utter nonsense based on simplifying the factorization so far, that it turns into a problem on the difficulty level of "factorize 9" - _before_ running the experiment.
Journalists however tend to lack the knowledge to accurately represent that, resulting in nonsensical record claims.
[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf
(Thanks to all who mentioned the year - we've since added to the title above.)
Major Quantum Computing Advance Made Obsolete by Teenager (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28413023 - Sept 2021 (44 comments)
Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654220 - July 2018 (216 comments)
Customers who liked this Recommendation Engine may also like its Dequantization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17519001 - July 2018 (30 comments)