Some fun short clips of Seth Lloyd at the IQC. Love the first one. Disagree with the second one. The third is a great hope. Disagree strong with the fourth one (since I think the definition of a computer must include fault-tolerance.) The fifth one is a great ad!
And the music. Well the intro and final music is…awesome.
O brave new quantum world!
Your link seems broken: do you mean to link to this? http://new.iqc.ca/news-events/archive/seth-lloyd
Seth may not always be right, but he certainly puts himself out there! There’s a lot to be said for that.
Linked fixed. Thanks Henry.
Dave,
Re: four. Which is it? Is the universe not computing, not quantum or not fault-tolerant.
Just curious.
@Mike: Question answered tomorrow when an article of mine is posted on Ubiquity! 🙂
Until then: to the question “what is a computer?”, I would say that one has to include the notion of fault-tolerance in what it means for something to be a computer. A system without fault-tolerance is not a computer. Thus much of nature is not a computer using this definition (digitization is an emergent property, for example.) Does this rule out the universe as a computer? Not at all, but the use of computer to describe the noisy quantum universe seems heavy handed to me 🙂
Dave,
I read the article — quite interesting.
I guess my list of possibilities above would have been more complete if I had added: “the universe is a faulty computer.”
Now, that conclusion should make sense to just about everyone — you only have to look around and see that it must be true 🙂
As with everyone else, I greatly enjoyed all of Seth’s short commentaries … both the ones that I agreed with, and the ones that I didn’t.
Here’s the commentary with which I most agreed (unedited):
The preceding commentary is, I think, both true and very beautiful, and Seth admirably motivates us to explore the essential unity of quantum and classical dynamics … and I have lightly edited Seth’s second commentary to illuminate that unity from a modern dynamical point-of-view.
The preceding adjustments arise naturally when we collide two terrific descriptions of dynamical processes: the informatic dynamics of (for example) Nielsen and Chang’s Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (2000), and the geometric dynamics of (for example) Mac Lane’s 1970 Chauvenet Lecture, Hamiltonian Mechanics and Geometry.
As Mac Lane’s lecture puts it:
It is striking, and regrettable too, that the word quantum (and its associated mathematics) appears nowhere in Mac Lane’s lecture … and it is similarly striking, and similarly regrettable, that the word symplectic (and its associated mathematics) appears nowhere in Nielsen and Chuang. Both points-of-views are beautiful and powerful … and how much more evident will this beauty be, in future textbooks that merge them?
This informatic-geometric gap is good news for young QIT/QSE researchers … it means that we have plenty of wonderful work to do, in merging 20th century conceptions of informatic and geometric dynamics.
As Mac Lane puts it, all of the essential elements we need for this unification “were really discovered and used a long time ago” … a full decade ago! … by quantum computing researchers. 🙂