Preview the final essay of Quantum Country, "Quantum mechanics distilled"

Thank you for that thoughtful feedback, Amir! Lots of good kindling for future evolutions to the medium. —Andy

Andy Matuschak

It's inelegantly put (my fault). It's just that our usual notion of reality does not, in fact, correspond to reality. (M)

Andy Matuschak

I had to come back to the article to finish it completely and I think I may have confused the system because I was partly in review (i.e. "5 days") and partly completing the article itself (i.e. "in-text"). This brought up a few points that I'll offer as observations: 1. I didn't have a sense of how long it would take me to get through the article. I think sites like medium automatically calculate how long it will take to read an article, which is helpful. I think whatever calculation they use it would need to be modified to account for time to work through some of the new application questions. 2. As an adjunct to the previous point, perhaps the article could be metered out over many days or have pause points where those could be picked up? 3. I received an email for review before I had completed the full article. On another note, the section on Bell's Inequality is the best explanation I've read so far. I had learned about it previously during the MIT xPro course, but never fully understood it as it was explained there. The concrete examples (x2!) were excellent. Thank you.

I'm not sure I understand the statement, "it's not reality which needs an update, it's our notion of what is real" - can you expand a little bit? Did you mean "it's not (the definition of) reality which needs an update"?

My belief - this is speculation - is that a quantum AI (or AGI) is likely to be significantly superior to an AI or AGI based on conventional models of computing. It's fun to think about what that might mean! (M)

Andy Matuschak

Yup, it seems like a small change in the medium in some ways, but I believe it's likely pretty significant! (M)

Andy Matuschak

Amir & Kartik - Thanks for the typo pointers. We'll fix them in the next deploy. (M)

Andy Matuschak

In the opening paragraph, What exactly do you mean by creating "quantum intelligences?" What would that look like other than quantum computers?

I enjoy how you have asides to explain the mnemonic medium in the course of the article.

Hadamard gate shown in postulate 2 section is the X gate. Probably a copy/paste error.

I am glad to see that a major shortcoming of the mnemonic medium (or really software like Anki) is being addressed in this expansion. I found some typographical issues: In the image following "So too is the Hadamard gate, H:", the matrix for Hadamard needs revision. Also, it seems there is a word missing after "... later may seem headslappingly" "So the second postulate appears to be a special case of the second postulate where there is just a single outcome." of the third postulate? "This just the Pauli Z matrix." is missing an "is".

Reading right now. So far so good. Thanks for this missing piece of the puzzle. One small typo I found: "the stakes are not wining or losing" - should be winning; unless of course you wanted to say *whining* haha