Incompatibility between 't Hooft's and Wolfram's models of quantum mechanics

Multilinear Formulas and Skepticism of Quantum Computing

Several researchers, including Leonid Levin, Gerard 't Hooft, and Stephen Wolfram, have argued that quantum mechanics will break down before the factoring of large numbers becomes possible. If this is true, then there should be a natural set of quantum states that can account for all experiments performed to date, but not for Shor's factoring algorithm. We investigate as a candidate the set of states expressible by a polynomial number of additions and tensor products. Using a recent lower bound on multilinear formula size due to Raz, we then show that states arising in quantum error-correction…