University of Waterloo moves one step closer to taking over the quantum world and wins a 18 million dollar grant. Even in Canadian dollars thats a lot of moolah. Congrats to the Waterlooans, who, it seems will be getting a new centre (which is something like a “center” but might also be a lookout.)
O brave new quantum world!
This line is my favorite:
>The laws of quantum mechanics will be applied in computing, material science, sensing, medicine, manufacturing and other areas.
Are the laws of quantum mechanics applicable to any other areas?
Hmmmm … quite $18M is quite a large investment … and coincidentally timed to coincide with today’s preprint Entanglement entropy and the simulation of quantum mechanics, which asserts “A common misconception states that, in general, large quantum mechanical systems cannot be efficiently described by classical means [and] furthermore, the processing of the state, e.g. the computation of its time evolution, and the computation of observables also requires exponentially many operations.”
It’s definitely fun to read bluntly described as a “misconception”, what so many quantum textbooks state as accepted wisdom.
A common misconception held by those who’ve never written a quantum monte carlo program, examined density function theory, or performed density matrix renormalization group methods. Nor those who’ve taken a course in data structures and learned that exponential is often in the eye of the beholder or computational complexity and realized that NP-complete does not mean exponential. Nor by those who’ve tried to efficiently factor integers, studied the theory of communication complexity nor thought about the query complexity of finding a hidden XOR mask. 🙂
Don’t get me wrong, I think the use of entanglment as a guide towards coming up with new algorithms for simulating some quantum systems is great. No, not great…awesome! Do I think it will be able to simulate Shor’s algorithm? No. Do I think it will lead to the distruction of the exponential sepaations we see in communication complexity? Not unless there have been some serious math errors.
John, are you a quantum computing Luddite?
Worse — I’m a Unitarian! 🙂
John, are you a quantum computing luddite?