paper

Quantum Godwin's Law

arXiv:2003.13715

Abstract

Godwin's law, i.e. the empirical observation that as an online discussion grows in time, the probability of a comparison with Nazis or Hitler quickly approaches unity, is one of the best-documented facts of the internet. Anticipating the quantum internet, here we show under reasonable model assumptions a polynomial quantum speedup of Godwin's law. Concretely, in quantum discussions, Hitler will be mentioned on average quadratically earlier, and we conjecture that under specific network topologies, even cubic speedups are possible. We also show that the speedup cannot be more than exponential, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses to a certain finite level. We report on numerical experiments to simulate the appearance of the quantum Godwin law in future quantum internets; the most amazing finding of our studies is that -- unlike quantum computational speedups -- the quantum Godwin effect is not only robust against noise, but actually enhanced by decoherence. We have as yet no theoretical explanation, nor a good application, for this astonishing behaviour, which we dub quantum hyperpiesia.

arXiv comment6 pages, 10 figures. Comments are welcome but will likely be ignored

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