quantum computer generates the first truly random numbers ever

relativity is random in my universe, meaning it is in between relativity infinite big and cold, and relative infinite small and hot. Although there is order to it, one can be denser and hotter than another, you can't really say our universe is hot or cold, big or small.
 
but everything carries memory of its history with it regardless if it understands that memory or not. interpretations of what is real as something else can create randomness amongst a group?
 
but everything carries memory of its history with it regardless if it understands that memory or not. interpretations of what is real as something else can create randomness amongst a group?
You're saying it's not possible to interact with something without leaving a trace?

There's no such thing as a reversible process?
 
You're saying it's not possible to interact with something without leaving a trace?
There's no such thing as a reversible process?

Why not? If you interact with something, you affect it, change it, leave some impression. The question now is whether that change is detectable
 
Why not? If you interact with something, you affect it, change it, leave some impression. The question now is whether that change is detectable
So you believe in time.

Irreversibility is the Second Law, which is the arrow of time.
 
how is time an illusion? I don't follow pop stuff very well.
You're right, it's faddish.

I don't follow it much myself either.

Something to do with disentanglement.

 
There's a "time is an illusion" crowd in modern physics.

Well, it is and it isn't. Remember, time is an illusion because it is all relative, not absolute.

Then again, without time, there can be no space. So time is here to stay.

IMO, it isn't time that's the problem but our very limited and complicated perception of it.
 
So its probably impossible for something to not have a temporal context. You have a living memory from ant to human, or something stores memory like a rock a book or a computer. So again this brings up hallucinating as something that creates a random pattern of interpretation and explaining. Believing in hallucination leads to random acts and likewise believing that time doesn't exist or a lot of what is out there, if not all of it, theoretical is going to be very similar to hallucinating. So I don't think there is a bottom to this pit of thinking.
 
As is well known, digital computers are incapable of generating truly random numbers.

The best they can do is "quasi-random", which means they look random but will repeat after a long enough time.

Turns out, quantum land is the one and only place in the universe where we get truly random behavior.

And now for the first time, quantum computers are proven to be able to harness this behavior.


From the standpoint of physics, randomness is a primary property of the quantum universe. No one knows how it happens. One of the very interesting things about it is, its distribution is flat, not Gaussian. In other words, it disobeys the law of large numbers.

Which in turn means that there's a unitary process underlying it. (As distinct from a bunch of little processes).

Nothing in this universe would be possible without the randomness. Everything from our consciousness to light itself depends on it.

Mathematically, it is entirely unclear whether there is any connection between randomness and quantization. No one knows if these are different processes, or part of the same process. Quantization is associated with counting, whereas randomness falls into the "uncountable" category. One can think of this in terms of the difference between the integers and the reals. The integers are "countably infinite" whereas the reals are "uncountable".

The relationship between the two was explored by the mathematician Georg Cantor, who discovered the famous Cantor Dust. It works like this:

Quantum processes generate random real numbers between 0 and 1. So take the interval (0,1) and chop out the middle third. (Which means you know have two intervals remaining, the left third and the right third, each of which have length 1/3). For every remaining interval, chop out the middle third, and keep doing this recursively an infinite number of times. You end up with a "dust", and what Cantor proved is that this dust has the same number of points as the interval it started from. The dust has the same number of points as the entire interval (0,1), its cardinality is the same.

This remarkable and counterintuitive proof arises because we're trying to count the reals. Which, apparently, doesn't work. In math, 'points' are countable, and topology changes this into the concept of "neighborhoods", which overlap in uncountable ways.

So when we generate a random number, we're not really generating a 'point', we're generating a neighborhood. This concept is driven home in probability theory. If you have a continuous distribution with probabilities on the interval (0,1), the probability of getting "exactly" .5 is ZERO. However the probability of getting a result in an epsilon-neighborhood around .5 is finite and positive. In other words you have to integrate over the neighborhood to get a non-zero probability.

No one ever actually wants "random numbers".
When computers are used to generate "random numbers" instead they must always be an exact distribution, which is exactly repeatable.
Random numbers that were actually random, would be useless.
For example, if you were to get actually random number between 1 and 10, at some point you would get a dozen repeats of the same number.
It is bound to happen randomly eventually.
So a computer random number generator avoids that and mathematically computes a distribution instead of actually being random.
 
Well, it is and it isn't. Remember, time is an illusion because it is all relative, not absolute.

Then again, without time, there can be no space. So time is here to stay.

IMO, it isn't time that's the problem but our very limited and complicated perception of it.
I know a lot about time perception.

The most important thing about it (from a neuroscience standpoint) is its continuity.

We know that our perception of time speeds up and slows down under various conditions.

We also know about "time cells" in the hippocampus that delineate the boundaries of episodes and the events within episodes.

However the key piece with respect to our consciousness is "continuity of scale".

We are able to seamlessly tie together events at the subsecond scale (like, a drummer holding a back beat) to events over seconds or minutes (episodic memory) to events that happened years ago.

We can also "time" motor behavior very precisely, in any of those time scales. And we can predict "when" events will occur, either by themselves or relative to other events.

For example, I remember Chester Thompson's drum solo from a Genesis concert in 1980, and on a good day I can replicate most of it. So that's 3 different time scales all in one. Our brains have the capacity to zoom in and out of time scales, pretty continuously.

This is something very different from "time delay learning" in AI. It's topological, both algebraic and geometric.

In our brains, the "flow" (direction) of time is induced by the sensory consequences of motor behavior. "First" muscles twitch, "then" there are sensory consequences. This learning occurs prenatally when babies start kicking. It is pretty fully developed by age 1 or so.

I claim that every stochastic process is irreversible. A choice, or an outcome, can not be reversed. Its consequences can sometimes be undone, but the historic choice remains.

The very idea that we can locate "events" in spacetime is a corollary of this fundamental truth.
 
No one ever actually wants "random numbers".

Lotteries?

When computers are used to generate "random numbers" instead they must always be an exact distribution, which is exactly repeatable.

Only over thousands of outcomes.

Random numbers that were actually random, would be useless.

No, they are the driving force behind the combinatorial explosion of the universe.

For example, if you were to get actually random number between 1 and 10, at some point you would get a dozen repeats of the same number.
It is bound to happen randomly eventually.

Yes. You're talking about the "return time" of a stochastic process. We can calculate the expected return times for most processes, even the high dimensional nonlinear chaotic ones.

So a computer random number generator avoids that and mathematically computes a distribution instead of actually being random.

Random is a perceptual word. A stochastic process has a "character" that we can only determine by repeated observation, unless we can formulate it theoretically. For example - the Poisson distribution of a time series is a fundamentally different "kind" of randomness from the Bernoulli distribution of a coin flip.

For example - in a high dimensional nonlinear situation - let's say you were standing at a fixed location in the middle of a hurricane, and you were taking samples of the wind speed and direction. You would see randomness along both the "what" and "when" axes. Are they the result of the same process? Or are they two different processes?

Well, have a look at the Lorenz attractor.

1746085397328.webp


It has a "shape", yes? And, if you follow the trajectories you get variation in both space and time. In this kind of process, the "expected return time" is almost meaningless, the variance will greatly exceed the normalized mean.

The weather can not be modeled with "a" distribution, you have to use a Monte Carlo method, which means generating random numbers and then solving the equations. Each random outcome corresponds to a single point in the phase plane. You can only see the "shape" of the attractor after plotting thousands of such points.

In this situation, there is not "a distribution", instead there is an attractor that pulls the system in one direction or another depending on the local conditions, which themselves are random. In essence, the equation describing the local dynamics changes randomly.

 
Is randomness at odds with a denial of deterministic outcomes?
Random is by definition, non deterministic, past behavior has no influence over future state, if it does then it isn't random.
If so, is it always so?

Also, quick question: can any outcome of chaos be determined?
It is determined, the future state is completely determined by the past and by laws, but it is not always possible to predict that future state because miniscule differences (like a difference in the hundredth decimal place) in initial conditions can lead to huge differences in the future state eventually.

The weather never ever violates the laws of physics it always obeys those laws but we cannot predict the future state very well.

 
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Yes, it is not possible to interact with something without leaving a trace.

Women are different from the quantum universe. :p

I'm pretty sure your picture is a fallacy.

It's not the observer that matters, it's the measurement.
 
As is well known, digital computers are incapable of generating truly random numbers.

The best they can do is "quasi-random", which means they look random but will repeat after a long enough time.

Turns out, quantum land is the one and only place in the universe where we get truly random behavior.

And now for the first time, quantum computers are proven to be able to harness this behavior.


From the standpoint of physics, randomness is a primary property of the quantum universe. No one knows how it happens. One of the very interesting things about it is, its distribution is flat, not Gaussian. In other words, it disobeys the law of large numbers.

Which in turn means that there's a unitary process underlying it. (As distinct from a bunch of little processes).

Nothing in this universe would be possible without the randomness. Everything from our consciousness to light itself depends on it.

Mathematically, it is entirely unclear whether there is any connection between randomness and quantization. No one knows if these are different processes, or part of the same process. Quantization is associated with counting, whereas randomness falls into the "uncountable" category. One can think of this in terms of the difference between the integers and the reals. The integers are "countably infinite" whereas the reals are "uncountable".

The relationship between the two was explored by the mathematician Georg Cantor, who discovered the famous Cantor Dust. It works like this:

Quantum processes generate random real numbers between 0 and 1. So take the interval (0,1) and chop out the middle third. (Which means you know have two intervals remaining, the left third and the right third, each of which have length 1/3). For every remaining interval, chop out the middle third, and keep doing this recursively an infinite number of times. You end up with a "dust", and what Cantor proved is that this dust has the same number of points as the interval it started from. The dust has the same number of points as the entire interval (0,1), its cardinality is the same.

This remarkable and counterintuitive proof arises because we're trying to count the reals. Which, apparently, doesn't work. In math, 'points' are countable, and topology changes this into the concept of "neighborhoods", which overlap in uncountable ways.

So when we generate a random number, we're not really generating a 'point', we're generating a neighborhood. This concept is driven home in probability theory. If you have a continuous distribution with probabilities on the interval (0,1), the probability of getting "exactly" .5 is ZERO. However the probability of getting a result in an epsilon-neighborhood around .5 is finite and positive. In other words you have to integrate over the neighborhood to get a non-zero probability.
Your post was pretty random
 
I know a lot about time perception.
The most important thing about it (from a neuroscience standpoint) is its continuity.

Yes, but I was not really talking about our biologically-driven perceptions. My point is that time exists independent of whether anyone is there or not to measure it.
  • If I walk across the room, it takes time.
  • If an atom vibrates, it takes time.
Time is the inescapable fabric which holds space together.
 
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