AAAAADDRRRIIIIIAAAANNNNNN!!!

Remember analog computers? You would set up a circuit so that the voltage in one place was the answer to your computation, and then instead of calculating the answer you would *measure* the answer. We stopped thinking about them because it was tricky to set up the circuit for each calculation, but once you had it set up the computation would happen at the speed of electrons.

The D-Wave computer is similar to this. Given a polynomial in many variables (with positive real coefficients, and the variables only take the values 0 and 1), you might like to find the assignment to the variables that minimizes the polynomial. So D-Wave sets up a thermodynamic system whose steady state can be *measured* and gives an assignment to the variables that makes your polynomial small. Systems will naturally try to minimize their energy, and so the assignment is likely to be your perfect minimum (repeat 100 times, and the best assignment is likely to have appeared).

The question is whether the system minimizes its energy by classical thermodynamic flow (super fast), or by quantum effects (super-duper fast). It is, for that particular sort of problem, *much* faster than anything else ever. It had seemed to be so much faster and accurate that it had to be using quantum effects. But now somebody has found a faster way to do it classically, so that it isn't *that* much faster. For those of you in the know, the question isn't speed but the rate of growth of the speed: is the ratio of speed-up growing polynomially in the input, or exponentially?

As an instructor, I enjoy teaching a small class much more than teaching a large one. Presumably, teachers who are enjoying their work will do better than teachers who aren't. In my personal experience, the quality of the education I provide varies wildly from class to class and semester to semester. Within a classroom, there are always a few students who "get me" and vice versa, and always a few that I just don't jive with.

SAT scores are bad to correlate with because they have nonobvious selection biases. For example, the state schools in Indiana don't require the SAT at all, so only those students who are hoping to leave the state for school take the SAT. This inflates the scores dramatically. In other places (Vermont, perhaps?) the SAT is required for all colleges, and so essentially all high school students take the SAT, deflating scores. Throw in the effect of guidance counselors recommending school A instead of school B, and SAT (by state, or by school) make very poor predictors. Even by student, it doesn't do very well, but that's another post.

Physics: http://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure1.htm Chemistry: http://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure2.htm Psychology: http://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure1.htm And for the record, the authors refer to these as "fields of study", not "fields of science."

"...cubicles have shrunk to ... 49 feet". That *is* small.

If slashdot had a like button, I'd be giving you some rapid-fire love now.

The story isn't that they planned to do this, and it is unreasonable to conclude that the plan was ineffective. The story is that they developed a plan to do this. I'd be shocked if China didn't have a plan (or a dozen plans) for the conquering of Taiwan. I'd be horrified if they actually planned to invade Taiwan. Military people need to practice between real action, and drawing up contingency plans is a way to do that. It's healthy, and prevents much stupidity from seeing the light of day. For example, from thinking about this, they may be led to realize that net censorship is ineffective and counterproductive unless it is undertaken on a brazen scale. That would be good, and IMHO more likely than that it will lead to real attacks on Wikileaks.

You've missed the point: it isn't mathematicians who've made it overly complicated. It is people responsible for /teaching/ math. Mathematicians have made it exactly as complicated as it needs to be, no more and no less. But many textbook authors have taken that complicatedness and introduced it into areas where it isn't needed, out of a lack of understanding as to why it was needed in the first place. An example from TFA: mathematicians prefer "|x-5|2" over "x is between 3 and 7" because the former generalizes naturally to arbitrary metric spaces (like R^n). But until somebody is ready to talk about distance in R^2, and circles and such, the latter should be preferred. It uses less notation, and requires less thought to really grok.