Yeah, classical computers might need a lot of resources to simulate quantum mechanics. Quantum computers have no such limitation though, so it’s probably not relevant to the simulation argument. Note that the paper doesn’t mention the simulation argument, it was added by journalists working under evil incentives.
EurekAlert mentions the simulation argument, and the page implies that this was a press release from Oxford—even providing a media contact—though I have not found the document on Oxford’s own website.
I am also skeptical of what the paper (arxiv) is actually saying, on a technical level. It reminds me of another paper a few months ago, which was hyped as exhibiting a “gravitational anomaly” in a condensed-matter system. From all that I could make out, there was no actual gravitational effect involved, only a formal analogy.
This paper seems to engage in exactly the same equivocation, now with the objective of proving something about computational complexity. But I’ll have to study it in more detail to be sure.
Yeah, classical computers might need a lot of resources to simulate quantum mechanics. Quantum computers have no such limitation though, so it’s probably not relevant to the simulation argument. Note that the paper doesn’t mention the simulation argument, it was added by journalists working under evil incentives.
EurekAlert mentions the simulation argument, and the page implies that this was a press release from Oxford—even providing a media contact—though I have not found the document on Oxford’s own website.
I am also skeptical of what the paper (arxiv) is actually saying, on a technical level. It reminds me of another paper a few months ago, which was hyped as exhibiting a “gravitational anomaly” in a condensed-matter system. From all that I could make out, there was no actual gravitational effect involved, only a formal analogy.
This paper seems to engage in exactly the same equivocation, now with the objective of proving something about computational complexity. But I’ll have to study it in more detail to be sure.