OK everyone: At several people’s request, I’ve now taken a look at arXiv:1403.7686, and I can confirm that it’s complete garbage. The author is simply mistaken that solving the Schrödinger equation is “NP-complete” in any interesting sense: his argument for that seems to rely on a rediscovery of the adiabatic algorithm, but he doesn’t mention that the spectral gap could be exponentially small (and hence the annealing time could be exponentially large)—the central problem that’s been the bane of Farhi and his collaborators (and, of course, of D-Wave) for the past 15 years.
Also, even if you thought (for totally mistaken reasons) that quantum mechanics let you solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, that might (or might not) suggest to you that quantum mechanics should be replaced by something else. But until you’d actually found a replacement, and given some sort of evidence for its truth, I don’t see how you could claim to have thereby “solved the measurement problem”!!
As additional problems, the author appears to conflate the P vs. NP problem with the question of whether NP-complete problems can be efficiently solved in the physical world, a common novice mistake. And also, he seems comically unaware of everything that’s been discovered in quantum computing theory over the past 20 years relevant to the issues he’s writing about—as if he just emerged from a cave.
While reading the summary and the paper abstract, I thought this was all way overstated and trivially so. Glad to see someone professionally working in quantum computing thinks so, too.
OK everyone: At several people’s request, I’ve now taken a look at arXiv:1403.7686, and I can confirm that it’s complete garbage. The author is simply mistaken that solving the Schrödinger equation is “NP-complete” in any interesting sense: his argument for that seems to rely on a rediscovery of the adiabatic algorithm, but he doesn’t mention that the spectral gap could be exponentially small (and hence the annealing time could be exponentially large)—the central problem that’s been the bane of Farhi and his collaborators (and, of course, of D-Wave) for the past 15 years. Also, even if you thought (for totally mistaken reasons) that quantum mechanics let you solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, that might (or might not) suggest to you that quantum mechanics should be replaced by something else. But until you’d actually found a replacement, and given some sort of evidence for its truth, I don’t see how you could claim to have thereby “solved the measurement problem”!! As additional problems, the author appears to conflate the P vs. NP problem with the question of whether NP-complete problems can be efficiently solved in the physical world, a common novice mistake. And also, he seems comically unaware of everything that’s been discovered in quantum computing theory over the past 20 years relevant to the issues he’s writing about—as if he just emerged from a cave.