This is not the blog you are looking for. Or, well as of Nov 5, 2007 it is not the blog you are looking for. That’s right, the Quantum Pontiff is moving. Because change is good, life is short, and bad puns are a good reason for doing things, this blog is moving to Scienceblogs.com. The new web address is http://scienceblogs.com/ponitff. RSS will appear here.
Oh, I forgot to tell you what the bad pun is. Shame on me. Scienceblogs.com is under the umbrella of Seed Media Group. Thus I can say that in moving the pontiff, “I’m going to Seed.”
So grab your beer and come on over. For now I’m leaving the archives live for the pontiff here as there is still at least one thread are people are still commenting.
The Quantum Pontiff Has Landed
Look, up in the air, is it a bird? No. Is it a plane? No. Is it the quantum pontiff? Yes! Yes! The Quantum Pontiff! Um, okay….but what exactly is the quantum pontiff? Besides, of course, the juxtaposition of two words which don’t often find themselves seated together at the dinner table…
Continue reading “The Quantum Pontiff Has Landed”
States in the Morning, States in the Evening, States in the Afternoon
0711.0047: “Tunable quantum interference: How to make morning, noon, and afternoon states” by Holger F. Hofmann, Takafumi Ono. We can blame Jonathan Dowling?
Teleportation
While we quantum informationistas have not achieved teleportation, apparently the job market now allows for such a transform: TeleportMyJob.com (I wonder where they get their high quality Bell Pairs.)
Arxiv API
The arxiv has added an API. Funny I was just complaining about the lack of an API.
Break
From an article in the Seattle Times on a local UW student competing in the 2007 TopCoder Collegiate Championship:
TopCoder is a private company that makes money by selling some of the finished code and matching employers with contestants. The competition is also sponsored by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, Deutsche Bank and the National Security Agency — which states on the competition Web site that it wants to employ U.S. citizens to help break.
Yes, I copied that over correctly. “to help break.” Ah perfect fodder for paranoid interpreations: (1) NSA is in Seattle Times computers and didn’t want a mention of breaking cryptosystems. (2) The Seattle Times is part of the liberal media establishment and therefore “break” is a political slip of the tongue to remind us that the U.S. intelligence community is behind torture (that the NSA is not the CIA can not stop the conspiracy minded who will immediately note that the head of the CIA was previously the head of the NSA.) (3) “Break” is a code name for the NSA’s quantum computer. They need programmers for it’s quantum computer. Nuf said.
QIP 2008 Talks
The list of contributed talks for QIP 2008 is now available:
Invited talks
Dorit Aharonov, Hebrew University
Andris Ambainis, University of Waterloo and University of Latvia
Avraham Ben-Aroya, Tel-Aviv university
Patrick Hayden, McGill University
Oded Regev, Tel-Aviv University
Ben Reichardt, California Institute of Technology
Renato Renner, Cambridge
Falk Unger, CWI, Amsterdam
Michael Wolf, Max-Planck-Institute for Quantumoptics, Garching
Contributed talks
30-minute talks
Oded Regev and Ben Toner. Simulating Quantum Correlations with Finite Communication.
Graeme Smith. The private classical capacity with a symmetric side channel
Julia Kempe, Hirotada Kobayashi, Keiji Matsumoto and Thomas Vidick. Using Entanglement in Quantum Multi-Prover Interactive Proofs
Gabor Ivanyos, Luc Sanselme and Miklos Santha. An efficient quantum algorithm for the hidden subgroup problem in nil-2 groups
Andrew Cross, Graeme Smith, John Smolin and Bei Zeng. Codeword Stabilized Quantum Codes
Toby Cubitt, Aram Harrow, Debbie Leung, Ashley Montanaro and Andreas Winter. Counterexamples to additivity of minimum output p-Renyi entropy for p close to 0
Nikhil Bansal, Sergey Bravyi and Barbara Terhal. Classical approximation schemes for the ground-state energy of quantum and classical Ising spin glasses on planar graphs
Simon-Pierre Desrosiers and Frederic Dupuis. Quantum entropic security and approximate quantum encryption
Julia Kempe, Oded Regev and Ben Toner. The Unique Games Conjecture with Entangled Provers is False
Gilles Brassard, Anne Broadbent, Joseph Fitzsimons, Sebastien Gambs and Alain Tapp Anonymous quantum communication
20-minute talks
Ivan Damgaard, Serge Fehr, Louis Salvail and Christian Schaffner. Secure Identification and QKD in the Bounded-Quantum-Storage Model
Jean Christian Boileau, Lana Sheridan, Martin Laforest and Stephen Bartlett. Quantum Reference Frames and the Classification of Rotationally-Invariant Maps
Ivan Damgaard, Serge Fehr, Renato Renner, Louis Salvail and Christian Schaffner. A Tight High-Order Entropic Quantum Uncertainty Relation With Applications
Stefano Pironio, Antonio Acin, Nicolas Brunner, Nicolas Gisin, Serge Massar and Valerio Scarani. Device-independent security of Quantum Key Distribution
Stephanie Wehner and Andreas Winter. Higher entropic uncertainty relations for anti-commuting observables
Stefano Pironio, Miguel Navascues and Antonio Acin. Quantum probabilities, semidefinite programming, and optimization over Hilbert spaces
Zhengfeng Ji, Jianxin Chen, Zhaohui Wei and Mingsheng Ying. The LU-LC conjecture is false
Scott Aaronson. Quantum Copy-Protection
Julia Kempe, Hirotada Kobayashi, Keiji Matsumoto, Ben Toner and Thomas Vidick. On the Power of Entangled Provers: Immunizing games against entanglement
Daniel E. Browne, Elham Kashefi, Mehdi Mhalla and Simon Perdrix. Determinism in Measurement based quantum computation
Dan Browne, Matthew Elliot, Steven Flammia, Seth Merkel, Akimasa Miyake and Anthony Short. Phase transition of computational power in the resource states for one-way quantum computation
Aram Harrow. Quantum expanders from any classical Cayley graph expander
Tsuyoshi Ito, Hirotada Kobayashi, Daniel Preda, Xiaoming Sun and Andrew C.-C. Yao. Generalized Tsirelson Inequalities, Commuting-Operator Provers, and Multi-Prover Interactive Proof Systems
Keiji Matsumoto. Self-teleportation and its application on LOCC estimation and other tasks
Kazuo Iwama, Harumichi Nishimura, Rudy Raymond and Shigeru Yamashita. Unbounded-Error Classical and Quantum Communication Complexity
Robert Koenig and Renato Renner. Sampling of min-entropy relative to quantum knowledge
Matthias Christandl and Ben Toner. De Finetti theorems for finitely exchangeable conditional probability=20 distributions
Yi Zhao, Fred Fung, Bing Qi, Christine Chen and Hoi-Kwong Lo. Quantum hacking: experimental demonstration of time-shift attack
Julien Degorre, Marc Kaplan, Sophie Laplante and Jeremie Roland. The complexity of simulating non-signaling distributions
Jonathan Walgate and Andrew Scott. Completely Entangled Random Subspaces
Comet Holmes
Comet Holmes went from seventeenth magnitude to 2.8 magnitude on October 24th. Okay Seattle time to clear up your skies so I can get a view of the sucker.
Dr. StrangeArmitage
Am I the only one who thinks Richard Armitage (watch the whole thing at your own sanity’s sake)
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=XdwBR44aeBs[/youtube]
sounds just like General ‘Buck’ Turgidson from “Dr. Strangeloveor: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”:
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=HgyjlqhiTV8[/youtube]
? “Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!”
Fourth Time a Charm?
Three strikes…
Dear Dr. Bacon,
We regret the delay in obtaining a review on your manuscript.
The paper has been sent to three referees who have not provided
reports. We are now sending to a fourth referee asking that he/she
expedite review. As soon as we have additional information, we
will advise and thank you for your patience.
But, wait, who is out?