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Amazon's self publishing service
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SciRate Page For 0902.2658Here we study the performance of a concatenated error-detection code in a system that permits only nearest-neighbor interactions in one dimension. We make use of a new message-passing scheme which maximizes the number of errors that can be reliably corrected by the code. Our numerical results indicate that arbitrarily accurate universal quantum computation is possible if the probability of failure of each elementary physical operation is below approximately 10^{-5}. This threshold is three orders of magnitude lower than the highest known.
Quantized Poker?
I like poker and I like quantum computing and lo and behold here is a paper with both:
arXiv: 0902.2196
Title: Quantized Poker
Authors: Steven A. Bleiler
Poker has become a popular pastime all over the world. At any given moment one can find tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players playing poker via their computers on the major on-line gaming sites. Indeed, according to the Vancouver, B.C. based pokerpulse.com estimates, more than 190 million US dollars daily is bet in on-line poker rooms. But communication and computation are changing as the relentless application of Moore’s Law brings computation and information into the quantum realm. The quantum theory of games concerns the behavior of classical games when played in the coming quantum computing environment or when played with quantum information. In almost all cases, the “quantized” versions of these games afford many new strategic options to the players. The study of so-called quantum games is quite new, arising from a seminal paper of D. Meyer cite{Meyer} published in Physics Review Letters in 1999. The ensuing near decade has seen an explosion of contributions and controversy over what exactly a quantized game really is and if there is indeed anything new for game theory. With the settling of some of these controversies cite{Bleiler}, it is now possible to fully analyze some of the basic endgame models from the game theory of Poker and predict with confidence just how the optimal play of Poker will change when played in the coming quantum computation environment. The analysis here shows that for certain players, “entangled” poker will allow results that outperform those available to players “in real life”.
Steven?
links for 2009-02-17
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Picture Gallery for listing 29003112Now that's a Seattle swimming pool view.
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Court documents from a settlement between Facebook and ConnectU showed that Facebook values itself at $3.7 billion, much less than the $15 billion that was speculated during the Microsoft investment. The AP uncovered this by cutting and pasting from the redacted court document. It’s the same thing we showed in our PDF redaction screencast last summer… and it will never cease to be funny.
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New Zealand town is in the dark — and proud of it"The town of 830 people on New Zealand's South Island is on a mission to protect the sight of the night sky, even as it disappears behind light and haze in many parts of the world.
The ultimate prize would be UNESCO's approval for the first "starlight reserve," and already the "astro tourists" are coming." -
The reality check is that the social utility of the prediction markets is marginal. The added accuracy is minute, and, anyway, doesn’t fill up the gap between expectations and omniscience (which is how people judge forecasters). In our view, the social utility of the prediction markets lays in efficiency, not in accuracy. In complicated situations, the prediction markets integrate facts and expertise much faster than the mass media do. It is their velocity that we should put to work.
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In a Rapid Communication appearing in Physical Review B, Vasile Garlea and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Germany, and the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique in Grenoble, France, report an unusual magnetic-field-induced spin ordering in a geometrically frustrated quasi-one-dimensional compound, Sul-Cu2Cl4
Quantum Sloan Winners
Congrats to the quantum tenure odds booster award winners Sloan award winners:
Robert Raussendorf, UBC
Hartmut Häffner, UC Berkeley (Go Bears!)
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Haavard
Scott Aaronson, MIT (that other Tech school)
Andrew Houck, Princeton
Subhadeep Gupta, University of Washington
Lance lists the theoretical computer scientist winners.
A What Bit?
A correspondent writes to me about a recent article in the APS News describingThe Top Ten Physics Stories of 2008 and notes a very troubling sentence:
Diamond Detectors
Work on the molecular structure of carbon continues to show great promise for quantum computing. This year scientists were able to construct a nano-scale light source that emits a single photon at a time. The team first removed a solitary atom from the carbon’s otherwise regular matrix and then introduced a nitrogen atom nearby. When they excited this crystal with a laser, single polarized photons were emitted from the empty space. These photons could be used to detect very small magnetic forces. Additionally the photons emitted contained two spin states and were able to exist in that state for nearly a millisecond before their wave function collapsed. The emitted photon is essentially a long-lasting qbit which could, with further development, be entangled with other adjacent qbits for uses in quantum computing. Another team at the University of Delft in the Netherlands, working in conjunction with UCSB, was able to detect the spin of a single electron in a diamond environment. At the same time, a group at Harvard was able to locate within a nanometer a single Carbon-11 impurity using its nuclear spin interactions.
Qbit? What’s a qbit? Doh.
links for 2009-02-16
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In a Rapid Communication appearing in Physical Review B, Vasile Garlea and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Germany, and the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique in Grenoble, France, report an unusual magnetic-field-induced spin ordering in a geometrically frustrated quasi-one-dimensional compound, Sul-Cu2Cl4
Perimeter Distinguished Research Chairs
In addition to the distinguished Dr. Hawking, the Perimeter institute lands nine very impressive distinguished research chairs, including some familiar quantum names.
Continue reading “Perimeter Distinguished Research Chairs”
Fault Tolerance – It's No LAFTing Matter
Conference of interest to the fault-tolerant crowd (hm, wording not quite right):
Event Title: Workshop on Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT)
(affiliated with LICS 2009)
Date: 08/15/2009
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Description:
We are soliciting papers on logical aspects of fault tolerance. The concept of
“fault” underlies essentially all computational systems that have any goal.
Loosely speaking, a fault is an unintended event that can have an unintended
effect on the attainment of that goal. “Fault tolerance” is the term given to a
system’s ability to cope in some way with a fault, either inherently or through
design. Fault tolerance has been studied for its application to circuits, and then
branching out to distributed systems and more recently to quantum computers, where
the concern with fault tolerance is almost the paramount issue. The relevance to
biological computation is also obvious. Papers must be concerned with mathematical
logical approaches to fault tolerance, not simply fault tolerance.
Selected papers will appear in Logic Journal of the IGPL (Oxford U. Press).
IMPORTANT DATES:
Papers due: April 17, 2009
Notification: May 22, 2009
Final papers: July 10, 2009
Workshop: August 15, 2009
links for 2009-02-13
Dark Side of the…Whah?
Over at the fact builders blog, the fact master discusses The Physics of….Pink Floyd. Being two areas I greatly enjoy, I was reminded by the fact builders picture of the cover of “The Dark Side of the Moon” of a little known piece of Pink Floyd strangeness. Anyone notice something peculiar about the back and cover of DSOTM:
Update: Ian provides a picture of the inside of the DSOTM, where, we find, all hell breaks loose: