Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm
Report a link problem
Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment order> “Tang is killing [Kerenidis and Prakash’s] quantum speedup, but then in another sense Tang is giving a big improvement and building on what they did. Tang never would have come up with this classical algorithm but for their quantum algorithm,” Aaronson said. I think this deserves more emphasis: regardless of whether or not we need a quantum computer in the end, as a model quantum computing is apparently useful to do research with and advance the status quo of…
Her thesis is now available "Quantum Machine Learning without any Quantum" https://ewintang.com/assets/tang_thesis.pdf
This makes me wonder. It occurs once in a while that a student (although in this case a particular bright mind) solves a complicated problem where experienced researchers haven't. One well known example that comes to mind is the famous George Dantzig case (he mistook 2 open statistics problems for an assignment, and promptly solved them). Also in this case Tang apparently was hesitating to approach his his mentor Aaronson about this. And Aaronson also wanted additional scrutiny like presenting…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 1061
- Total comments
- 309
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-07-31 | Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation AlgorithmFirst breakout · Best thread | okket | 824 | 216 |
| 2021-03-04 | Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm | RiderOfGiraffes | 2 | 0 |
| 2021-06-10 | Major quantum computing advance made obsolete by teenager (2018) | mojuba | 1 | 0 |
| 2021-09-04 | Major Quantum Computing Advance Made Obsolete by Teenager (2018) | g42gregory | 113 | 44 |
| 2025-07-24 | Major quantum computing advance made obsolete by teenager (2018)Hall induction · Latest 20+ point return | kwie | 121 | 49 |