The Unitarihedron: The Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Computing

For a while I thought he was making a joke about how if you continue to abstract a given theory, you end up &quot;encompassing&quot; everything eventually, but not in a useful way. To put what I mean in programmer terms, if you take a Javascript framework, and just keep abstracting and abstracting and abstracting, to a pathological degree, you ultimately can end up with your &quot;Javascript framework&quot; consisting of:<p><pre><code> eval(x) </code></pre> where the user supplies x. It is literally the most powerful Javascript framework ever!... and yet, obviously, also not useful. It trivially encompasses every possible Javascript program, at the price of not saying anything useful about any of them.<p>But then he threw me when he linked to what appears to be a real proof. I read through it, and found no signs it was tongue-in-cheek itself.<p>So I&#x27;ll admit I&#x27;m at an impasse here; if he&#x27;s got a real mathematical construct that is usefully better than what was presented, I don&#x27;t get the tongue-in-cheek tone; if it really is tongue-in-cheek, I don&#x27;t get what the real proofs are doing there, unless the proof is itself the best-disguised joke I&#x27;ve seen in the math world. (Generally I&#x27;ve got a pretty good eye for mathematician humor, even in fields I know little about.)

I don&#x27;t quite get it.<p>After looking at the linked to papers, I&#x27;m assuming this is not a joke, and he is not putting down (making fun) of the Amplituhedron, nor making up the Unitarihedron (just abstracting his work with a media-friendly name to itit).<p>What he is joking about is simply that mathematicians should named their work as a (insert-something-here)-hedron, as that would cause the media to pick it up and report on it.<p>Is this correct?

Sadly, the joke&#x27;s lost on me. Is he making fun of the other &quot;hedron&quot; and this Unitarihedron is a joke too? Which is too bad. I was having high hopes for the future and I wasted time reading an inside joke.

Can someone help enlighten me a bit here. From a layman&#x27;s standpoint after reading all the comments associated with the Amplituhedron article, it seems both from a semi-professional standpoint and layman standpoint it was an unique discovery. Now that a true professional has responded, is Scott here simply mocking at the marketting success of the Amplituhedron or is actually making a point about the existence of such mechanics prior to the discovery of Amplituhedron? Thanks.

What I had taken away as the big impact of the original &quot;amplituhedron&quot; article was that the researchers had found a way to replace long calculations with a shorter, <i>geometrical</i> calculation. Which, unless there&#x27;s some profound connection between quantum complexity classes and geometry that I&#x27;m not aware of, wouldn&#x27;t be the case with the &quot;unitarihedron.&quot; So perhaps Aaronson isn&#x27;t giving the amplituhedron concept the quite credit it deserves?<p>(Disclaimer- I haven&#x27;t the background in complexity nor physics to have any idea, obviously. But geometrical calculations playing a key role in a theory that &quot;did away with space&quot; seemed like a wonderfully cool paradox.)

I don&#x27;t usually like scott aaronson, (although I like his casting of QM as complex-valued probability space) - but this blog post was a gem.

Baj. Jumbug. Their hedrons are only special cases of my 42-dimensional Universahedron, which certifiably and undeniably contains everything, including all possible universes. The proof is too small to publish in this post.

The Simon&#x27;s Foundation version with discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6403285" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6403285</a>

I had a unitarihedron hanging from my rearview mirror in high school. It was pretty awesome.

<i>Though, in recent months, my research has focused even more on the diaperhedron</i><p>Damn, we should compare notes, we&#x27;re researching the same thing :-)<p>I need to make a mental note that if the mathematician or physicist tries too hard to get on TV &#x2F;news and sell something, he might not be as great as others.

The article is definitely satirical and points out the futility of any -Hedron based device regardless of its theoretical truth. You can&#x27;t calculate the volume of a fractal in fact some fractals can be proved to have zero volume!