Aussie nerd ripped off by gorgeous Sheila

An Australian quantum computing researcher, whatever that is, has been ripped off by two gorgeous models in a TV advertisement. Here's the ad:



Now it would be bad enough that the ad, for Ricoh printers, is nasty and sexist, a pisspoor pun on the word "model" and atrociously badly made. But that's not what concerns Scott Aaronson, who blogs here. He's concerned that the dialogue is lifted verbatim from a lecture he gave, posted here. He should stop complaining, if you ask me. This is without a doubt the closest an MIT geek has ever come to two beautiful women.

On his blog, Scott writes:

What we can prove is this: suppose you throw away the structure of an NP-complete problem, and just consider it as an abstract, featureless space of 2ⁿ possible solutions, where the only thing you can do is guess a solution and check whether it’s right or not. In that case it’s obvious that a classical computer will need ~2ⁿ steps to find a solution. But what if you used a quantum computer, which could “guess” all possible solutions in superposition? Well, even then, you’d still need at least ~2^n/2 steps to find a solution.

Well duh.

(via)