Quantum Advantage

Update (22 May 2017): This Scirate thread seems to have touched a nerve. Since this was previously buried in the comments here, it’s worth promoting to the top of the post. I think that “quantum computational supremacy” addresses the concern. Basically, we use “quantum” as an adjective for our peer group, which makes the analogy to “white” too …

Seattle for QIPers

QIP 2017 is coming to Seattle, hosted by the QuArC group at Microsoft, January 16-20 (with tutorials on the 14th and 15th). If you have some spare moments, maybe you arrive early, or maybe you are planning for the afternoon off, here are some ideas for things to do around the wonderful city I call …

5 Years!

Five years ago I (it’s me Dave Bacon former supposed pseudo-professor and one time quantum pontiff) jumped off the academic ship, swam to shore, and put on a new set of clothes as a software developer for Google. Can it really have been five years? Well I should probably update this blog so my mom …

What If Papers Had APIs?

API is an abbreviation that stands for “Application Program Interface.” Roughly speaking an API is a specification of a software component in terms of the operations one can perform with that component. For example, a common kind of an API is the set of methods supported by a encapsulated bit of code a.k.a. a library …

QIP 2015 business meeting

A QIP 2015 epilogue: our notes from the business meeting. See also this post by Kaushik Seshadreesan. Business Meeting Report local organizing committee report Finance: $193,545 – $191,467 = $2,478 profit! registration income: $185,340 refunds, about $3,000 external sponsorships: $30,450, and another $5k due later total income before tax: $212,900 after tax: $193,545 Expenses: tutorial: …

QIP 2015 zombie-blogging, Day 5

Today’s highlight: an algorithm running in time , also known as “polynomial time” or “efficient”. Joseph Fitzsimons and Thomas Vidick. A multiprover interactive proof system for the local Hamiltonian problem(Plenary Talk) abstract arXiv:1409.0260 Thomas begins by reminding everyone about what NP is and mentions that Super Mario is NP-complete. However, I solved it as a …