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NOTE: I write this in a state of intolerable jet-lag and hunger, so apologies for any mistakes below. As a bank employee, I have to reiterate that this none of what follows is financial advice. The only financial advice I have for you is, well, give me all your money and we’ll go get ice-cream together.

Is this Quantum Netflix?

No.

Then what’s so cool about this work?

I think this work is cool for a few reasons

  • This might be the first time we’ve managed to make a quantum state (which is a strange ethereal object) interact with an external network (like the Internet). So, a quantum program now can make HTTP-like queries for data and instructions from an external source. This allows us to implement algorithms where all the necessary data may not be available in advance or can only be streamed one slice at a time (this is referred to as the streaming model of data access.)
  • It turns out, in the streaming model of data access, there are quantum algorithms which provide an exponential advantage in space. That’s pretty cool, don’t you think? Importantly, the advantage in space happens to be “unconditional” meaning that I don’t have to strange mathematical assumptions to guarantee it.
  • We use our new architecture to solve perhaps the simplest streaming problem for which we know of a quantum space advantage.
  • One major issue with “quantum advantages” is that, once you take into account the challenge of protecting an algorithm against noise, these advantages tend to vanish away. But, it turns out, for the particular problem we solve in our work, the space advantage persists even with all the overheads of error-correction (which we painstainkingly calculate.)

How would you rank this work against other scientific achievements?

I would place it somewhere between the moon landing and the discovery of penicillin.

More personally, how’s life bro? Watching anything good? Reading anything fun?

All good, man, all good. I watched Baby Driver on the airplane recently, which I thought was pretty good. I’ve developed an odd feeling of kinship with Graham Greene after listening, again and again and again, to Colin Firth’s reading of The End of an Affair (What a book! Although, I’ll admit it’s the kind of book that only appeals to a certain sub-genre of men. Still, if there’s one thing I’m glad to have experienced in the year 2025, it’d be this book). I also thought the Our Man in Havana was pretty fun, and I’m currently listening to a BBC adaptation of John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy.