I'm quitting my PhD
For what it&#x27;s worth, I burned out sometime in the late 90s just after video cards came out around 1997, because I could see how they would drive video game design towards a narrow branch of DSP&#x2F;rasterization and building derivative games with cookie cutter libraries. At the time, I was more interested in getting away from all of that and exploring stuff like ray tracing and artificial life. My interest in video games never fully returned in the same way. And if I&#x27;m being truthful, I&#x27;ve been burned out ever since, approaching 25 years now.<p>But after two lost decades, I&#x27;ve noticed a shift lately. I think that people are getting fed up with centralized control of the supply chain and are maybe looking towards things like FPGAs as a way to get to a level above the current imperative programming paradigm, rather than working at the level below it in the glorified DMA transfer and shader paradigm we have now (vertex buffers).<p>For something as esoteric as quantum computing, I think it would help the world a great deal if someone would go back to first principles and explain it how it is. Not with complex notation, but with counting principles from probability and statistics. I had a great teacher in college who taught it just exactly that way, by imagining small groups of apples and bananas and how we could count them and detect larger patterns to get to stuff like Bayes&#x27; theorem.<p>So for example, we can imagine cubits as coin flips that we haven&#x27;t looked at yet. If there are relationships between multiple unseen coins, then we can map out that potential solution space like a big tree. Then look at the tree with random sampling of the superposition to infer where the answer probably lies. Which is a lot faster than iterating through all all of the permutations with a computer. But I suspect that convergence will end up taking roughly the same amount of time as brute force, due to noise or some fundamental aspect of the universe we don&#x27;t understand yet. But I&#x27;m probably wrong about that, because I haven&#x27;t gotten clarity on how any of this stuff actually works, because nobody bothers to write it this way from first principles.<p>Even if the author isn&#x27;t going to be doing quantum mechanics in academia, it would help the world a great deal to share what they&#x27;ve learned so far!