Author: dabacon

Posted on

A Visitor

For those of you local to Seattle, Scott Aaronson, keeper of the complexity zoo, will be giving a talk this Thursday:

Event: Colloquium, 05/25/2006 11:30 am, Gates Commons, CSE 691
Speaker: Scott Aaronson (University of Waterloo)
Talk: The Learnability of Quantum States
Abstract: Using ideas from computational learning theory, I’ll show
that “for most practical purposes,” one can learn a quantum state
using a number of measurements that grows only linearly with the
number of qubits n. By contrast, traditional quantum state tomography
requires a number of measurements that grows exponentially with n.
I’ll then give two applications of this learning theorem to quantum
computing: first, the use of trusted classical advice to verify
untrusted quantum advice, and second, a new simulation of quantum
one-way protocols.
Even though there exists an algorithm to “learn” a quantum state after
a small number of measurements, that algorithm might not be efficient
computationally. As time permits, I’ll discuss ongoing work on how to
exploit that fact to copy-protect and obfuscate quantum software

Posted on

Holy Grails

From article entitled “Bright Outlook for Queenland Nanotechnology Alliance”:

…their efforts are focused on making a significant impact into solving many of the holy grails, such as clean energy, personalised medicine and quantum computing.

Well I’m not sure if quantum computing is a hoy grail, but I’m pretty sure quantum computing researchers all know and laugh at “The Holy Grail.”

Posted on

Tale of Two Conferences

Right now I’m in the middle of an incredibly strange transition. Friday and Saturday the Northwest Section of the American Physical Society had its annual conference in Tacoma (at the University of Puget Sound: what an acronym, eh?) This conference was full of all sorts of cool physics, astronomy, and even the history of physics (did you know that graphs were not really used until the mid to late nineteenth century. How strange?!) Starting this evening, I’ll be attending the 38th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing which is being held here in Seattle. I’m sure the next few days will be filled with all sorts of cool theoretical computer science. Now I’m faced with getting my brain to move from an experiment involving electromagnetically induced transparency to understanding capacity achieving list decoding codes. So if my bloggings seem a little random, well, you’ll know that this transition has fried my brain.

Posted on

$-Wave

Okay, we will officially call this week “D-wave week.” According to an article here (update: for a link that may work for all browsers, see here), D-wave just secured another round of financing, to the tune of $14,000,000.

Posted on

Not Quite That Wide

An article today in the New York Times describes a cool experiment with “backwards propogating light.” It’s a cool experiment, but what I love best from the article is the following line:

However, the pulses were in a shape known as Gaussian, which is, in principle, infinite in width, though in practice not quite that wide.

Winner of the understatement of the year?

Posted on

My Last Name

It’s Bacon! (Warning: the linked site may lead to abnormally clogged arteries.)
Update: From the comments,

Bacon, Bacon, Bacon
www.baconrobots.com – Because the only thing better then Bacon is a hot animatronic lady cooking it for you.
www.ratethebacon.com – A site for bacon lovers who love to talk about bacon.
www.baconspectator.com – Home of the Bacon of the Month Club.
www.craftyplanet.com/bacobuddies.htm – Bacobuddies – how cool is that.
www.blacktable.com/bacon030515.htm – Bacon soap.
www.makinbacon.com/welcome.htm – I’m sorry, but microwaving bacon is just wrong.
www.cookingforengineers.com/article.php?id=3 – Or is it? Scientific Bacon.
www.cockeyed.com/inside/bacon/bacon.html – The economy of bacon.
www.bayoudog.com/04kitchen/bacon.htm – Bacon as heroin.
www.iheartbacon.com – for the Bacon obsessed

Posted on

Quantum Computing for Undergrads?

Lately I have been pondering how I would teach quantum computing to computer science undegraduates. Imagine the class was made up of juniors and seniors who are majoring in computer science or computer engineering. How would you teach such a class?
My first thought is that I would attempt to structure the class more around programming and simulating quantum circuits than on the more abstract course that one normally sees in quantum computing. Certainly this would have the advantage of stressing the students previous strengths (leaving out, unfortunately, the theory students. But if they are really destine to be theory students they should try to take the graduate level course, no?) It would also give them hands on access to the abstract ideas of quantum computing. What I’d really like to use for this would be somethign akin to a hardware description language combined with a simulation synthesis tool. It would also be awesome if a CAD tool could also be developed. However, I haven’t seen anything quite resembling this in the quantum simulation world, but I’d certainly be happy to find out if such programs exist.

Posted on

Depth or Breadth?

Which would you rather have, breadth or depth? Suppose I give you the choice between the following two directions in experimental research in quantum computing in the next five years: either a few (say ten to thirty) qubits with extremely low decoherence and high control precision (perhaps even a high enough to perform quantum error correction) or a huge number of qubits (say hundreds to thousands to millions) with fairly poor decoherence and control. Assume that in both cases, fabrication can be done with a fairly high degree of sophistication. Of of these two options, which would you perfer to see in the near future?

Posted on

D-Wave News

D-Wave Systems, those crazy Vancouverites trying to build a quantum computer, have a new CEO:

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, May 9 /CNW/ – D-Wave, developer of the world’s most advanced computers, has appointed Silicon Valley technology executive and entrepreneur Herbert J. Martin as chief executive officer.

Which makes me dream of the day when I will be able to include in my grant proposal a request for dollars to buy a quantum computer.