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John Bostanci

@johnbostanci.bsky.social
94 followers 55 following 13 posts

I think about quantum computers. johnbostanci.com

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Henry Yuen @henryyuen.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
FOCS 2026 will be held in New York City Nov 8 - 11! CFP is up (link below). Submit your best work in theoretical computer science by April 1, 5pm ET.
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John Preskill @preskill.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
In the last post of a 3-part series, Dominik Hangleiter highlights the importance of efficient verification of quantum advantage, and assesses the prospects for achieving it soon. quantumfrontiers.com/2026/02/28/w...
quantumfrontiers.com
What is next in quantum advantage?
We are now at an exciting point in our process of developing quantum computers and understanding their computational power: It has been demonstrated that quantum computers can outperform classical …
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Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing @simonsinstitute.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
Congratulations to our colleague John Wright, who has received a 2026 Sloan Fellowship! chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/seven-u...
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Ben Brubaker @benbenbrubaker.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
How can we make sense of computational problems that we don’t even have the language to describe? I spoke to @henryyuen.bsky.social about what’s missing from the standard approach to quantum complexity theory — read more in @quantamagazine.bsky.social!
quantamagazine.org
A New Complexity Theory for the Quantum Age | Quanta Magazine
Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 13/02/2026
The list of accepted papers at #STOC2026 is out: acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/acc... Congratulations to all authors!
acm-stoc.org
STOC 2026 - 58th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
The upshots of this are that we get a much simpler proof of our lower bound against QCMA, and unlike spectral Forrelation, code intersection comes with a hard "classical search problem", so we can use existing ideas to lift it to the advice setting!
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
A recent line of works has shown that multiplicity codes (generalizing Reed-Solomon) have good list recovery. But their duals lack the distance for Yamakawa-Zhandry, so we modify the algorithm using biased hash functions to handle smaller distances. See the paper for details!
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
But the sampler still guesses a witness that can tell it about the hash values of a few codewords. The key is to use codes with near optimal list recovery so that knowing the colors of a few seeds doesn't tell you much about the others!
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
What happens when you apply this idea to the code intersection oracle? Well you get someone who can pick out sesame seeds and tell you their color, while blindfolded!
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Jonas, Chinmay, Mark and I made a really powerful observation: the clonability of a classical witness means QCMA verifiers imply samplers. With spectral Forrelation, this means sampling points from a sparse subset, given its Fourier transform. (Picture from Chinmay Nirkhe)
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
The oracle: Basically the intersection of hash functions, a linear code, and a mask. I like to think of the code as cuts in a block of tofu, and the hash function as different colored sesame seeds (Shoutout to Kunal Marwaha), and we ask if most of the sesame seeds were removed.
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Hi, I have a new paper out with Andrew Huang and Vinod Vaikuntanathan! We give another classical oracle separation between QMA and QCMA, and a classical oracle separation between BQP/qpoly and BQP/poly. Based on the Yamakawa-Zhandry code intersection problem. arxiv.org/abs/2602.09385
arxiv.org
Separating Quantum and Classical Advice with Good Codes
We show an unconditional classical oracle separation between the class of languages that can be verified using a quantum proof ($\mathsf{QMA}$) and the class of languages that can be verified with a c...
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John Preskill @preskill.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Dominik Hangleiter weighs in with an informative post about a much debated question: Has quantum advantage been achieved? This is the first post in a three-part series. quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/06/h...
quantumfrontiers.com
Has quantum advantage been achieved?
Recently, I gave a couple of perspective talks on quantum advantage, one at the annual retreat of the CIQC and one at a recent KITP programme. I started off by polling the audience on who believed …
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Henry Yuen @henryyuen.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
My student @johnbostanci.bsky.social, Chinmay Nirkhe, Jonas Haferkamp, and Mark Zhandry have put out a tour-de-force paper that shows, relative to a classical oracle, QMA is stronger than QCMA -- i.e., quantum proofs >> classical proofs. Congratulations to the authors! arxiv.org/abs/2511.09551
arxiv.org
Separating QMA from QCMA with a classical oracle
We construct a classical oracle proving that, in a relativized setting, the set of languages decidable by an efficient quantum verifier with a quantum witness (QMA) is strictly bigger than those decid...
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Anupam Gupta @anupamg.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
It's a thrill to announce names of the amazing set of theory people joining NYU CS+CSE this year: @aineshbakshi.bsky.social, Allen Liu, @fermima.bsky.social, Sanjeev Khanna, Tony Metger, and Juan Perdomo. @nyucourant.bsky.social @nyutandon.bsky.social
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Steve Flammia @sflammia.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
I'm hiring a postdoc! If you'd like to work with me on quantum learning, error correction, quantum algorithms, and FTQC at Virginia Tech in the Washington, DC metro area, please apply here: careers.pageuppeople.com/968/cw/en-us...
careers.pageuppeople.com
Details | Postdoctoral Associate - Computer Science | Careers | Division of Human Resources | Virginia Tech
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Craig Gidney @craiggidney.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
For sigbovik, I factored all 8 bit ints (up to 255) with a quantum computer github.com/strilanc/fal... I did it as legit as I possibly could. I ran a correct circuit with no optimization shenanigans. I did correct pre/postprocessing. It took 121 quantum samples to finish the entire task. But...
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Dulwich Quantum Computing @dulwichquantum.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
Congrats to Jeongwan Haah and Ewin Tang on being awarded the 2025 New Horizons in Physics and Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes respectively! breakthroughprize.org/News/91
breakthroughprize.org
Breakthrough Prize – Breakthrough Prize Announces 2025 Laureates in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics
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QIP 2025 Conference @qip2025.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Our third tutorial of QIP 2025 is “Quantum error correction: a guided tour" by Victor Albert (@vva.bsky.social) from NIST and QuICS, who will gently introduce and visit increasingly important corners of the mega-field of QEC (Sun Feb 23, 9am-12:30pm, Room 302ABC). Overview below:
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QIP 2025 Conference @qip2025.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Our second tutorial of QIP 2025 is by Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang from #Google Quantum AI on Quantum Learning and Certification (Feb 22 Sat, 2-5:30pm, Room 302ABC). Overview below:
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QIP 2025 Conference @qip2025.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
QIP 2025 is fast approaching! And we have exciting tutorials lined up on Feb 22-23 (Sat-Sun) right before the conference! First in line, we have Cambyse Rouzé from #inria, whose tutorial will cover Quantum Gibbs Sampling (9am-12:30pm, Room 302ABC).
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QIP 2025 Conference @qip2025.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Our fourth and final tutorial of QIP 2025 is by Dakshita Khurana from UIUC about Quantum Cryptography and TCS (Sun Feb 23, 2-5:30pm, Room 302ABC). Overview below!
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 05/01/2025
Can't wait to see everyone in NYC for ITCS! :D
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anthony-leverrier.bsky.social @anthony-leverrier.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
Good news for the new year: if you want a more streamlined proof of the landmark result MIP* = RE, then a new paper does that (and much more): arxiv.org/abs/2501.00173 (207 pages, though)
arxiv.org
The Aldous--Lyons Conjecture II: Undecidability
This paper, and its companion [BCLV24], are devoted to a negative resolution of the Aldous--Lyons Conjecture [AL07, Ald07]. In this part we study tailored non-local games. This is a subclass of non-...
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Shades of the "National Cold Fusion Institute" 👀
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Finally finished my 9+1, super excited to run the NY marathon next year! 😃 Time to start training 😅
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Jiahui Liu @jiahuiliu.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Peer reviews of the quantum cryptography community have been making me very depressed and nihilistic recently..... Wrote this just to vent.... gardenofforkingpath.blogspot.com/2024/12/some...
gardenofforkingpath.blogspot.com
Some thoughts after QIP reviews....
Peer reviews of the quantum cryptography community at the moment: Reviewers from other areas: "Not my area, not interested so reject" Revi...
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
The term “simulate” is used a lot in cryptography/theoretical CS (for example: simulating a verifier’s view in zero knowledge protocols). Maybe some of the terminology carried over because of the connection between quantum computing and crypto? 🤔
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Lance Fortnow @lance.fortnow.com · 04/12/2024
Now in one place, my sixty favorite theorems covering the six decades of computational complexity. blog.computationalco...
blog.computationalcomplexity.org
Favorite Theorems: The Complete List
Now in one place all of my sixty favorite theorems from the six decades of computational complexity (1965-2024). 2015-2024 Graph Isomorphism...
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
How do you get the motivation to keep playing rouge-likes once you’ve beaten it through once? Also who’s your favorite character in slay the spire? 😯
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John Watrous @johnwatrous.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
I just set the maximum possible bounty on a Quantum Computing Stack Exchange problem. I could answer myself, but I know many others could too, and this seemed like fun. quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/40...
quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com
What is the complexity of modulo order-finding problem on classical computer?
It doesn't seem to be NP-complete. But has it been proved to be NP-hard?
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 26/11/2024
Meanwhile, it's been 5 months since told at #STOC24, and SIGACT still hasn't made an official announcement about the recipient of the 2024 ACM SIGACT Distinguished Service Award (Sanjeev Arora) and why (commendation). You'd start to think that they don't really give a damn about service after all.
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John Bostanci @johnbostanci.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
I think tools that make it easier to create default things can also end up making unique things more valuable, hopefully AI isn’t an exception 😯
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