Kartik Singhal - Quantum Country interview - 2019-11-21

http://quantum.country/debug/userJourney?email=kartiksinghal@gmail.com

kartiksinghal@gmail.com
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Kartik joined Quantum Country in March (the day we released it?). He has finished the long-term level of QCVC! He’s almost finished the 2 months level of search, and he just finished 5 days for teleportation. He’s a PLT grad student at UChicago working on designing programming languages for quantum computing (academic site). Huh!

Highlights

• Kartik may have the most authentic serious-use context of anyone we’ve talked to: he’s a grad student, trying to do research in QC, but from a CS background, so he’s trying to learn as much QC as he can.
• He had a strong prior belief that memory is important to understanding, drawing on experiences with a rough transition to US schools from India.
• The teleportation essay was directly helpful to some of his present research: he was trying to explain that material to a general PLT audience, and the extra understanding helped him frame his work better.
• He finds the review sessions valuable, even for material he was already familiar with.
• He’s not terribly motivated by the progress mechanisms, and he’s slightly skeptical they reflect reality effectively. Hard to read too much into this since he’s only seen the new mechanisms once.

Raw notes

• Does research in QC+PLT, didn’t know anything about QC beforehand
  • ~2 years into PhD, came for PLT and distributed systems, PI suggested move into QC
• How’d you go about booting up in QC?
  • Adviser shared some books
  • Tried Mike & Ike, found it inaccessible—“came from CS + eng, not from physics/math”
  • Liked “QC using Linear Algebra”
  • Tried online MOOCs from Shor and Ike, seems pretty indifferent to them
  • Took grad-level class at UChicago, found it also inaccessible
  • Hadn’t studied QM at all
• Made QC zines
  • Their grant also includes edu-related work
• Came across QCVC via zine work in March
  • Was working with CS edu people who didn’t know too much about those things
• Why are you sticking with it?
  • Couldn’t find anything accessible to him and which he thought he could recommend to others. “After reading it the first time, the first thing I did was to share it with the team I was working with, who were also struggling with the content.”
• How do the review sessions help you?
  • “I only skimmed the first article. At the time I thought I knew all of that.”
  • (Did your perception of that change later?)
  • Some of the hardware-oriented material was knew
  • Even for “familiar” material, “it definitely reinforced my understanding”
  • Second article was new material to him
  • “I’m still getting a lot out of this article[’s review sessions]” Marking a lot of things as forgotten
  • The third article was highly relevant: he was working on a QM teleportation abstract at the time for a PL conference
  • Helped him give a beginner’s intro: he couldn’t assume his audience knew about computing
• Learned about SRS via “Learning How to Learn” but he never implemented it
• Feels some connection between question status and conceptual understanding
  • In places where he struggled (around Grover’s alg), he’s having trouble both with the cards and the conceptual level
• Currently trying to learn about: how do you think about and manipulate entanglement?
  • What if there were a mnemonic medium review paper about that?
  • “I read a lot of papers and I take notes, write in the margins, underline concepts I learn, but it’s completely on me to go back and review that. I don’t end up doing it in most cases. Having that system gives me a mechanism to reinforce my memory for the long term”
  • Why is reviewing important?
    • Talking with colleagues, having a good grasp on the concepts
    • Sometimes you need concrete details
    • “If I don’t have to google it all the time and you just have it in your working memory, it makes a huge difference. There’s a lot of value in having everything in your head.”
    • Used to believe memorizing details didn’t matter—that was in college. But when he moved to the US, he felt pressure to step up. Memorizing helped. “A lot of things I’d heard of, but I hadn’t really internalized. I always had to look them up to refer back to them.” Struggling even now.
  • He’d value having the cards already created and the study schedule automated
  • He created cards for another subject but struggles to set up a review habit
  • “In your case it emails and notifies me and the cards are pre-written. In Anki, I’d have to write those myself and remember to open the app”
• Feels it would be valuable to go back and reread the article
  • Wishes we nudged at some point to go back and reread—feels he’d get value out of that
• Asking about progress
  • He’s pretty indifferent to the mechanisms: he’d felt he already knew almost everything in QCVC, so it would have been a surprise if he didn’t have everything at the highest level
  • In search, he has 33/37 at 1 month, “but the questions aren’t equal”—the outliers are the ones he really worries about.
  • It’s as if we’re painting a rosier picture than what he really feels
  • I wonder how that might differ if he’d been using the new system this whole time, where he’d be seeing those circles fill up day by day