COMS W4281

I think the main components were 2 psets (hard) 10% each, weekly quizzes (easy) 5%, midterm and final (medium) 35% each. Most of my time was spent on exams and psets, otherwise weekly quizzes were 2 ish hours of work only.

5 homeworks, not very hard but sometimes tedious. Make sure you know your linear algebra. Each has a programming component to be done in MATLAB. Again, not hard but usually tedious. Two quizzes (one each before the midterm and final) that give you bonus points towards the exam grades. Midterm and final that are open everything -- no joke, you can use your iPhone if you want -- and are really just regurgitation for the most part. Like the gate decomposition thing, or "derive an algorithm to do X," where X is almost verbatim the description of some algorithm we covered in lecture and because the exam is open book you can just copy it out of the book. It is advisable to go to the midterm and final review sessions because *hint hint* the actual questions MIGHT be used as review examples, or simply given away outright by Papageorgiou. (I learned this the hard way.)

He was an amazing professor, highly recommend! I didn't have any sort of quantum background, and was intimidated by all the MS in Quantum Science people in the class, but it ended up being manageable and very fun to learn. Henry Yuen is a very nice professor, he explained things very well in class, had reasonable exams and psets (in my opinion), and was accommodating and understanding as well.

I feel kinda bad writing a harsh review because Papageorgiou is a really nice guy and cares a lot. He's the professor who looks over your shoulder while you're taking the midterm and tells you where you've made a mistake. (This boosted my score by at least 10 points.) He's the professor who absolutely glows when people do well on the homework. When he says his door is open, he _means_ it. Really means it. So I'm not going to shit on him because I don't like him. Or because my grade will probably suck, because that's my fault for losing interest and not doing the work past March or so. I'm going to shit on him because despite what a wonderful person he is, his teaching has thoroughly earned it. Before I launch into that, though, here's my recommendation if you want to learn about quantum computing: read Scott Aaronson's book, "Quantum Computing Since Democritus". I bought it and chipped away at it half-heartedly for a few days in February and it taught me more and explained things better than Papageorgiou did in a whole semester. Ok, now that we've got preliminaries out of the way: The class really is as close to an out-and-out waste of time as I've had at Columbia. Each lecture starts with a 10-30 minute review of the previous lecture (generally closer to 10 minutes, but 30 happened a few times), so you're getting maybe 2/3 of a lecture. And then during that 2/3 of a lecture,…

15+ hours per week on HW and office hours

5 problem sets. Homework was not too time-consuming. There were simple but helpful written problems. Most assignments also required us to write a "simulation" of some quantum algorithm in MATLAB. These were totally useless: often you would pass in the desired answers as an argument to the function. But it was surprising how helpful it was to my understanding to write them. 2 completely open-book exams (which includes any notes you want and even a laptop, for those students who pirate their textbooks). The exams had very high averages. If you asked a clarifying question during the exam, the professor was extremely generous with his answers; he wouldn't be coy if a mistake had led you astray.

Henry seems like a very nice guy, easily approachable and friendly. Unfortunately, he doesn't lecture or explain well at all, and has a tendency to push back deadlines and homeworks with no warnings or compensation. The exams and psets are insanely difficult and don't cover any of the class material. He will choose the topics that were barely explained in class and decide to focus a big portion of the exam on those topics. Does not reward hard work at all - the class is aimed at people who are specializing in CS theory. This is not an intro class.

This class was fairly easy; I definitely think it could have gone into more depth. But it was not a joke: it covered a reasonable amount of material in a reasonable amount of depth. Papageorgiou is just an effective teacher, and he doesn't assign cruel problem sets. The class covers only the basics of quantum computing. It's a CS class but it would be reasonable for a physics major to take it, if they had some very rudimentary CS knowledge (logic circuits, and the general idea of big-O analysis of runtimes). The fact that it was targeted at two groups limited the material we could cover. We couldn't really talk about complexity theory to avoid alienating the physics majors. And we couldn't talk about any actual quantum mechanics or real-world implementations of quantum computers, because that would have terrified the CS majors. You definitely need to know your linear algebra coming in. The first quarter of the class is basically linear algebra review, to familiarize students with the Dirac notation used in quantum mechanics, and help them get used to working with complex numbers. We then worked through how operations on quantum states can be equivalent to Boolean circuits (proving that quantum computers are at least as powerful as classical computers). The rest of the class was going over the famous quantum algorithms that are better than any known classical algorithm. Shor's…

I personally like it a lot and will highly recommend it, but I will provide some context. Context: I take some courses in physics (quantum mechanics), math (abstract algebra), TCS (complexity theory, algorithms etc.), so I'm quite conformable with proofs, abstract concepts, and quantum weirdness. Also due to these experiences, I get pretty accustomed to learning by myself via notes from class (or textbooks). So given these, I still feel the class is a relatively hard one. Professor Henry: Absolute nice and approachable. I believe he is the only professor currently specializing in quantum computing (a lot of big names probably also research on these, but I guess it's not a thing in their times and they don't do courses on his.) He is knowledgeable about the field, but perhaps due to his age and also the online format, I guess the lectures can be somewhat unstructured. Also, I believe he has never taught the topic to an undergraduate class, so he might have a slight over-expectation for this class. Lectures: Amazing and exciting! Quantum computing is so different from classical computing that you will feel like you are studying the frontier of science, and indeed we learn about all basic quantum computing stuff you probably heard from pop-science articles (Shor's prime factoring, Grover search, quantum teleportation...), rigorously. The downside is the materials are quite dense…