
This is a reading group to discuss the paper MIP*=RE of Zhengfeng Ji, Anand Natarajan, Thomas Vidick, John Wright, and Henry Yuen which, among other things, resolves the Connes Embedding Problem. This is a pretty exciting result — not least because CEP has been a longstanding major open problem — and a lot of the techniques used come from complexity theory and quantum information theory. The goal will be to review the techniques in the paper, including a lot of the background which may be unfamiliar to a pure mathematical audience, as well as its connections to operator algebras.

We are meeting on Fridays from 14:00-15:30 in room 116 of the Simons Institute. (Those not familiar with "Berkeley time" should be warned that for arcane reasons, 14:00 actually means 14:10.) Thomas Vidick and Henry Yuen have provided some suggested notes on what topics to cover and in what order, which may be found here. There is now also a Wiki related to the paper at http://mipstar.henryyuen.net/.

COVID-19 Due to the threat of COVID-19, we will suspend in-person meetings until the Berkeley campus as a whole resumes such meetings. Instead, we will meet using the video-conferencing program Zoom. A link to the weekly meeting is here, and we will still meet at the usual time from 14:00-15:30 on Fridays. Some brief instructions about how to join a Zoom meeting can be found, e.g., in this 50-second YouTube video (although it is fairly self-explanatory).

Scheduling Update: As of June 12, we will be meeting at 8:00 AM PDT, still on Fridays (and still respecting "Berkeley time").

A list of topics covered and presenters is below:

DateTopicPresenterReferencesRecordingSlides
Feb 7 Kirchberg's QWEP conjecture answers Tsirelson's Problem Ian Charlesworth [ 1 ]
Feb 14 How complexity theory gets roped in Ian Charlesworth [ 2, 3, 4 ]
Feb 21 An introduction to non-local games Patrick Lutz [ 5, 6, 7 ]
Feb 28 Self-testing and non-local games Patrick Lutz [ 8, 9, 10 ]
Mar 6 The PCP theorem Theo McKenzie [ 0, 11 ]
Mar 13 The Pauli Braiding Test Nikhil Srivastava [ 12 ] [ video ]
Mar 20 The big picture Saeed Mehraban [ 0 ] [ video ]
Mar 27 The COMPRESS Lemma András Gilyén [ 0, 13 ] [ video ] [ slides ]
Apr 3 No meeting, but note this week's talks from Simons [ ]
Apr 10 An explicit separation Ian Charlesworth [ 0 ] [ video ]
Apr 17 No meeting this week [ ]
Apr 24 Playing fuzzy games Saeed Mehraban [ 14, 15, 16 ] [ video ]
May 1 Parallel repetition Patrick Lutz [ 0, 17, 18 ] [ video ]
May 8 Compressed strategies Ian Charlesworth [ 0 ] [ video ]
May 15 Discussion [ ]
May 22 Discussion [ ]
May 29 Discussion [ ]
Jun 5 Discussion [ ]
Jun 12 Embezzlement of entanglement Richard Cleve [ 19, 20 ] [ video ] [ slides ]
Jun 19 Discussion [ ]
Jun 26 Discussion [ ]
Jul 3 Discussion [ ]