marzchipane

Quantum software engineer here - yes! I use Claude quite extensively with quantum SDKs like Qiskit and Pennylane. It tends to be very good at scaffolding and architecture, but can spiral or be outright incorrect when it comes to implementing certain algorithms like QAOA.

The real benefit comes from real-world integration - if I'm exploring e.g. a logistics application, it can source real-world data and models very quickly, and suggest quantum appropriate-formulations. Nevertheless, a lot of hand-holding is required.

Funnily enough just yesterday I spent an hour or so looking through a copy in a library! I took some photos, you can look through them here: https://marzchipane.com/reviews/books/codex_seraphinianus.md

The illustrations are gorgeous, and they've been floating around the internet for some time, e.g. the one with the pairs of fish which look like eyes.

https://marzchipane.com, mostly with reviews of books, movies, and webfiction, some photography and poems, and some web experiments. Some easter eggs as well ;)

Very interesting and so many throwaway lines that could easily be entire blog posts by themselves!

I wonder how hamstrung Disney is by their chosen animation style (wide-eyed cutesy characters, rounded edges, bright colours). Given the technical prowess on display here, what could they create if they gave their artists free rein to experiment like in Love, Death, and Robots? Or is it more that these constraints provide structure to work inside?

That's a cool thought! For those who may not know, Shor's algorithm is fundamentally quantum because it relies on the interference of probability amplitudes, which can be both positive and negative. It could not be directly implemented on a p-computer because you could only simulate this interference, which removes the exponential advantage.

It's possible that an entirely different approach is made possible by p-computers, but this would be tricky to find. Furthermore, it seems that the main advantage of p-computers is sampling from a Boltzmann-like distribution, and I'm not aware that this is the bottleneck in any known factorisation algorithm.

A bit of a digression: the article has the hieroglyphics presented as pictures, not as Unicode, even though Unicode has the entire(?) hieroglyph block already. After some digging, I found that this was because there aren't many (or any) popular fonts which implement the proper combinations of glyphs.

(While Unicode has combining diacritics, this isn't sufficient to e.g. stack the glyphs as shown in the article.)

However, it turns out that Microsoft has developed a tool that can modify an existing font to allow this, representing the hieroglyphyics properly. I've written a brief tutorial that shows how to actually use it:

https://marzchipane.com/notes%20and%20essays/interesting_uni...

(You may need to press Shift+F5 to reload fully if they don't show properly)

EDIT: hieroglyphs, not hieroglyphics