On returning home from Boston (one and a half days late due to 1. a broken plane and 2. a missed connection in Dulles), I found I had received my first copy of Nature Physics. I must say, I was very impressed by the first issue. Why? Well first of all are the gorgeous color pictures. Everyone loves color pictures, right? Seeing a journal of well written, beautifully typeset and illustrated physics articles appeals to the right side of my brain (the part that hasn’t shriveled away from too much math 😉 ) Second was that, unlike PRL, of which there is absolutely no way one can read all of the articles in a single issue, Nature Physics has a reasonable number of well written articles (at least for this initial issue.) I see from their author submission page that letters are limited to 1500 words long (typically four pages long) and articles to 3000 words long, which is a bit more freedom than that afforded by Physical Review Letters. I suspect that Nature Physics will quickly become a prestigious place to publish ones work. Of course, in an idealized world, it wouldn’t matter where you publish your work, as long as it was excellent work. On the other hand, it is true that due to the selectivity of different journals I’m more likely to find excellent work in certain journals than in others.
Quantum Audio Upgrade
Via a student from the class I taught this last summer, The Intelligent Chip:
The Intelligent Chip is a one inch square, bright orange plastic wafer that, when placed on top of a compact disc player for 2-3 seconds, upgrades the disc (CD, DVD or SACD) being played at the time. The sound of the upgraded disc has more detail and articulation, better dynamics and an absence of “digital harshness.” Voices are more human-sounding and less synthetic. The upgrade is permanent. Inside the white translucent Intelligent Chip case are two ultrathin, clear polycarbonate sheets, one on each side of the Chip. The manufacturer’s product brochure states, “The Intelligent Chip should be put back into the packing case after using, because the packing case can protect the quantum material of the Intelligent Chip, preventing them from leaking.”
Read the description of how it works. Who says quantum information science isn’t going to revolutionize the world….of audio devices. Why does my mouth taste like snake oil?
Computation….On the Edge
Via Three Quark’s Daily (Update: and also at Geomblog, which I somehow missed reading, but which has some great comments about quantum information science): The Edge (which you either love or hate) has announced a $100,000 prize in computation science The list of nominations for the first prize was announced at Festival della Scienza in Genoa on Novermber 1st.
The list of those nominated is a pretty interesting. From quantum computing land, those nominated are
CHARLES H. BENNETT, for his many ongoing contributions to the physics of information, including reversible computation, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, and quantum communication theory.
DAVID DEUTSCH, for the enormous potential of quantum computing in studying the architecture of the brain.
SETH LLOYD, for turning quantum computers from dream into device.
PETER SHOR, for his discovery of revolutionary algorithms for quantum computation, which will hasten the day when this fundamentally new mode of computation becomes practicable.
That nomination for David Deutsch seems a bit strange to me: it sounds like it was written for Roger Penrose! I would have nominated David Deutsch for fundamental work developing the idea of a quantum computer, realizing that quantum computers could outperform classical computers, and for fundamental insights connecting physics to the foundations of computer science.
Let It Snow, Let It Snow
Sweet, sweet, NW weather news. But remember, even with this good news, it is important for everyone to continue to perform a snow dance every few days or so.
Superpositions of Worms Going In and Out
Over at Fact and Fiction there is an interesting post about an article in New Scientist called Attack of the Quantum Worms.
Having not read the article, I thought I’d be an idiot and comment on what one could possibly mean by the statement that quantum computers are more susceptible to malicious attacks. I’m an even bigger idiot because I know very little about computer software security. But life’s about saying silly things and then getting chewed out by all you smart people, know?
The first thing one might mean is that quantum data cannot be backed up due to the no cloning theorem. OK, suppose I’m a hacker who wants to attack your quantum computer. Surely if I write some code which is executed by the computer and it damages the quantum state of the system, then, because I can’t back up the state of the quantum computer, I’m in big trouble. So it seems that one cannot prevent crashing a quantum computation by backing the state of the system up. But this isn’t quite right, is it? I mean suppose we have a classical computation and we make two backups of the state of the computation at any time. Then we can use this to test whether one of these states has been corrupted by majority voting. But we’ve learned that we can do exactly the same thing for quantum computers: we can detect if the quantum state of one of our copies has been corrupted by encoding into a quantum computer. Now we need to use more than three qubits per bit, but still, this doesn’t seem like such a big deal (from a theorist perspective 😉 ) Now I’d also like to say that I don’t think this is even the way classical computers protect themselves versus malicious software.
So what about attacking the “quantum software?” Well in a standard circuit model of quantum computation, the software is just a list of classical expressions. There is nothing quantum about the data describing a quantum computing program. So it seems that there can’t be any difference here between the quantum and classical world.
Oh well, I really should get a copy of the New Scientist and figure out if any of this rambling has anything to do with the article (on a similar note, I don’t understand the second part of the post at Fact and Fiction. I just don’t see the relevance of copying in a fixed basis: this is something which we almost always avoid in quantum computing because it destroys the coherence properties of the subsystem being so copied.)