Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Birds are amazing
In a post a while ago I mentioned that biologists were starting to think that birds engaged in quantum computing. To do this requires being able to stabilize entangled quantum states for a reasonable amount of time, something that we (actually, they) cannot do very well in a lab. However, it seems that birds really can do this in natural conditions for longer than our best lab rats can manage it (see here). Those tiny dinosaurs seem to have many interesting tricks up their beaks. Once one can stabilize entanglements how long before we discover that biological systems compute quantumly quite regularly? Not long, I surmise (again). Does anyone have any idea what this might mean for language or cognition? If so, I invite you to submit a post that I would be delighted to run.
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Does anyone have any idea what this might mean for language or cognition?
ReplyDeleteYou might have some idea, that the theoretical stuff you(we) linguists use would eventually prove to be useless because the innate computational mechanism should be of very different property than it is thought of having!
the theoretical stuff you(we) linguists use would eventually prove to be useless because the innate computational mechanism should be of very different property
DeleteHow exactly does that follow? Linguistic theories are stated, in Marr's terminology, on the computational level, whereas the difference between classical computation and quantum computation is at the algorithmic level at best: whether your machine operates over bits or qubits. Moreover, the main advantage of quantum computation is that it allows for truly parallel computation --- but the same is true of connectionist models, and those are not at odds with linguistic theories either (just see Smolensky's work).
Quite generally, popular science's fascination with quantum computation is rather overblown, at our current level of understanding quantum computers have very little to offer.