Hoisted from the comments, because looking at disassembled code is cool, Chris Lomont explains the Excel 2007 “65535” bug.
NPR Tunnels into Future State
nextquant Blog points to one of the most ill phrased NPR story titles of all time:
Quantum Computer Discovery Nets Nobel Prize
by Richard Harris
All Things Considered, October 9, 2007 · Two scientists will share this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries that have revolutionized computer memory.
Albert Fert of France and Peter Grunberg of Germany independently discovered a phenomenon that relies on the spooky world of quantum mechanics to read data from computer disks.
Most computers use it, because it allows manufacturers to pack a lot more data on a single hard drive. It also changed the way scientists and engineers have been thinking about computer memory.
Crap, if I knew that all I had to do was use my hard drive reading head to build a quantum computer I would have done that years ago.
Rethinking Scientific Talks
I’ve seen many a scientific talk, ranging from the truely inspiring, to the incredibly painful. I’ve also given many a scientific talk, ranging mostly to the incredibly painful end of the spectrum. Stuck in back of my head when I’m giving a not so good talk, there has always been a little devil saying “Come on, Dave, there has got to be a better way to give a talk!” Well usually I just ignore that little devil (“see him again on the forth of July”) but today watching a colloquium by Richard Anderson inspired me to think some crazy thoughts. Not because of the style of Richards talk, but instead because Richard is involved in a host of collaborative technology and its use in education, including the very cool Classroom presenter which I highly recommend for tablet based teaching.
Okay, so let me dream up a new way to give a scientific talk. First of all, I think we should take a lesson from Stephen Hawking. No, not a lesson in general relativity (allthough I’m quite certain that would be a great lesson, or at least a very hard lesson), but I mean I am totally jealous of Hawking’s speaking abilities. Why? Because he gets to write his talk before hand, plug it into his hand dandy speech synthesizer (“This synthesiser is by far the best I have heard, because it varies the intonation, and doesn’t speak like a Dalek. The only trouble is that it gives me an American accent.”), and then lets it rip. He just gets to sit back and enjoy his talk. Now I don’t think this is where I want scientific talks to be going totally. I don’t want prerecorded audio/video to be the only medium available for a talk. I mean sure, it is great to have resources like talks at the KITP, but I think scientific talks serve a broader goal than just the discinimation of a non-interactive lecture. But, let’s face it, giving a talk is hard. I mean live television, for example, is hard. But actors get to do multiple takes. They get to slowly think out the plan of their talk in advance and then don’t suffer from execution problems since they get to correct their mistakes. Certainly good speakers are the ones who can execute on demand, but isn’t there some way that we can use technology in an inovative manner to help bad speakers like me?
Deep breath. Okay so what am I advocating. First of all I want better presentation software. This software should allow me to prerecord parts of my talk. I should be able to then play this back at my own pace, stoping the prerecorded parts when I need to, jumping to parts which I’ve also recorded which explain tangential thoughts, as well as the ability for me to give a normal talk at any point AND I want this normal part of the talk to be recorded for posteriety so that I can use it if need be when I want to. I want giving a scientific talk to be more like being a music producer who can also sing their own song. I want my good explanations to be repeated and my bad ones to be easily thrown away. One inspiration for this is a talk which Manny Knill gives on fault-tolerance. As far as I can tell he has a big pdf file with all of the details of his work and he can easily move hyperlink style through the different relevant bits of information. This allows for a level of customization which the standard linear powerpoint doesn’t make natural (allthough I’m guessing there is a way to get powerpoint to imitate this, I just haven’t tried this or seen many people use it.)
Second I want vast communication to be occuring while I give a talk. One of the beauties of classroom presenter is that students can write on their tablet PCs and then send you up what they are writing. And its been my experience that the best talks are the talks where a great questioner is in the audience (for example any talk with Dorit Aharonov in the audience is destined to be a better talk!) Now the danger with allowing communication between the audience memebers during a talk is that they will be distracting. So first of all I think the in audience communication should not be point to point between audience members, but on a shared medium. Of great importance in this setup is people expressing questions or points they do not understand during a talk. I mean I can’t recall how many times I’ve given a talk and wondered how lost everyone is. With real time feedback it should be possible for talks to be adjusted on the fly to meet the demands of the audience. Further I think it can also help in that with a wide spectrum of viewers, some of the more informed viewers can actually help avert bad questions, which is probably almost as important as having a good questioner in the audience.
Okay, well the technology for carrying out talks like that I describe above is probably workable today. I think we lecture in particular styles because they have worked in the past, but I also think that we could probably use technology to allow us to give talks in an even more coherent and fullfilling manner. Well maybe I’m just dreaming, but someday, someday, I hope to give a heck of a talk that isn’t just me fumbling around with the laser pointer and mumbling something about hidden subgroups.
I say, We can dance, We can dance, Everything out of control
A psuedo-paper dance today: a perspective I wrote just appeared in Science. The perspective is about this paper: “Symmetrized Characterization of Noisy Quantum Processes,” Joseph Emerson, Marcus Silva, Osama Moussa, Colm Ryan, Martin Laforest, Jonathan Baugh, David G. Cory, and Raymond Laflamme, Science 317, 1893 (2007) Check out my raytracing skillz in the picture accompanying the perspective 🙂
And Thanks For All The Fish
Michael Nielsen’s switchin’ fields. I’m envious but also sad. Envious that he gets to do something totally cool and new, but sad that I won’t be randomly bumping into him at conferences where I try to explain to him some crazy idea I’m working on and then get to hear his wonderful laugh at my silly ideas. Oh yeah, and when am I ever going to get to use this joke again, huh?
On the more serious side of things, I myself often think about what I would do if I wasn’t working in quantum computing. Which always leads me to think about why I’m still in the field in the first place (history ain’t a good reason, in fact I’d say it is the worst reason of all.) There are mostly two or three things that really keep me in the field these days. One is that I really really really want to see a quantum computer built. And I think the current roadmap ain’t got nothing to do with how a large scale quantum computer will be built. I’ve always said that if I could see how some scheme for quantum computing would really work to build a large quantum computer I’d drop my theorists clothes and work towards building the damn thing. And I work today in the field because I’m naive enough to think that I might be able to contribute to the more radical ideas I think are needed for building a quantum computer.
The second thing which keeps me going these days is a personal quirk. When I first started working in quantum computing I was trying to solve NP-complete problems efficiently on a quantum computer. I was young and I was naive, yes. But I was also drawn to the promise of the power of quantum algorithms. And damnit I still want to come up with an algorithm for a quantum computer which is of some importance. Yep, I really really really want to at least break a public key cryptosystem!
Finally I would say that the other thing which keeps me in quantum computing these days is just to see what Scott Aaronson will do next. Actually what I really mean by this is I do think that quantum information science provides an interesting insight into computation and into physics. Quantum computing beyond the hype of a quantum computer. Quantum computing for its own intellectual sake of revealing more about our physical and computational universe. Quantum computing because (to channell Feynman’s ghost) our world is quantum damnit, and all these views of the interaction betwen physics and computer science which just go with classical computing are interesting but fundamentally lacking.
Of course all this thinking about what keeps me in the field of quantum computing or even in academia also is just my way of avoiding answering the question of what I would do if I wasn’t in the field. But that’s easy for me to answer I guess. I’d be at a computer startup (my original goal in life was to work at Apple, you know) or trying to get a job at someplace like D.E. Shaw where my friends who work there tell me exciting stories of interesting problems and silly sums of money which will let them do what they want in a few short years. Or maybe I’d be a lift operator at a ski resort 🙂
Professorship of Quantum Physics
Here is an awesome position for one of you bigwigs out there:
The Board of Electors to the Professorship of Quantum Physics, to be held in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), invite applications for this Professorship, to take up appointment on 1 January 2008 or as soon as possible thereafter. Applications are welcome from persons working in the broad areas of quantum computation and quantum information theory (with these taken to include quantum cryptography and quantum communication theory). The Professor will have an outstanding international reputation in their field of research and will be expected to provide strong academic leadership in research, teaching and other activities of DAMTP.
The Chair has become vacant on the departure of the post holder, Professor Artur
Ekert, who played a leading role in establishing a successful Centre for Quantum
Computation in DAMTP housing an internationally leading research activity in quantum information science. The Department wishes to appoint a new Professor who is able to sustain this general line of research to the highest possible standards.
Further information may be obtained from the Academic Secretary, University Offices, The Old Schools, Cambridge, CB2 1TT, (email: ibise@[elephant]admin.cam.ac.uk remove the [elephant] to get the valid email), to whom a letter of application should be sent, together with details of current and future research plans, a curriculum vitae, a publications list and form PD18 with details of two referees, so as to reach him no later than 30 September 2007.
Informal enquiries about this Professorship may be directed at any time to Professor Peter Haynes, Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, telephone: (01223) 337862 or email: p.h.haynes@[elephant]damtp.cam.ac.uk, remove the [elephant] to get the valid email. Further information about the post and the Department may be found at http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/.
Oh, and to translate this post across the pond, “centre”=”center” and “1 January 2008” is “January 1, 2008.”
Is the Sky Falling? Fundanationalist Edition
I’m as much a nationalist as Dick Cheney is a peace loving hippie. Except, of course, when it comes to funding. Yes, I am a “fundanationalist.” Particularly funding of quantum computing. Selfish? Indeed! And you would be too if your salary came from agencies scooped straight out of a bowl of alphabet soup.
So I have no qualms asking the question “Is the US the leading place to do quantum computing theory research?” Now how might one check this out? One way would be to look at the data from the last two QIP conferences. QIP is certainly the top conference for a certain kind of quantum computing theory, one which is more computer sciency than physicy. Note that over the last two QIPs there has been a more democratic method for inviting speakers, so that this data is arguably fairly representative of the work the community currently values. Here are numbers:
QIP 2007 [Brisbane, Australia]
US 12
Canada 8
Europe 13
Asia 1
Australia 1
Israel 2
QIP 2006 [Paris, France]
US 11
Canada 8
Europe 16
Asia 2
Australia 1
Israel 2
Note that I took the authors current affiliation and not the affiliation when they spoke, as I’m more interested in what the current state of theory research is. Well so the United States has less that one third of the speakers. So I would say that the US is certainly not dominating quantum computing research, but is in a three way tie for the top spot with Europe and Canada. Considering the lack of hiring of top quantum computing people in US universities (certain exceptions, of course, apply) I would guess that this divide is only going to deepen.
Of course truthfully I am happy to see quantum computing funded everywhere. However I wonder if this view is shared by those deep in the heart of government funding agencies. Is third place good enough for quantum computing theory research in the United States?
Quantum Computing Without Working in a Quantum Garage?
Over at Computational Complexity, Bill Gasarch asks about some of the things he’s heard about quantum computing:
I have been told quite often that
“You don’t have to understand Quantum Mechanics to work in Quantum Computing.”
Thats a good thing since I’ve also been told
“Nobody really understands Quantum Mechanics.”
I’ve also been told
“You don’t have to have studied Quantum Mechanics to work in Quantum Computing.”
I am skeptical of that.
Which reminds me of story about how I first tried to learn quantum theory. When I was growing up we belonged to a science book club. Most of the books we ordered where the fairly standard popular science kind of books. But there were more technical books available and I had already read a lot of popular science on quantum theory, so I decided that I wanted to get a real textbook on quantum theory.
So I ordered up this textbook
Okay, so now you’re saying, “Get to the point Dave!” And certainly most of you might guess that the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t need calculus to learn quantum computing (true) or that you don’t need to know quantum physics to learn quantum computing (note I said “physics” here.). Of course the later is true, you could pick up Nielsen and Chuang and learn quantum computing without ever solving a particle in a box problem in quantum physics. But why would you want to do this? When you really care about learning something, it’s not about what you do or don’t need to begin learning, it’s about trying to grab ahold of as much information and having as much fun as possible. For example, you could turn this question around and ask, “Do you need to have taken a course in computational complexity in order to do quantum computing?” The answer is, I think (no wait, I know from personal experience!), “no.” But why would you not want to learn about P, NP, PP, BPP, EXP, etc. (and the new complexity class MIT. By the way MIT is contained inside of CIT. I have a proof of this, but it doesn’t fit in the margins of this blog.)? So while I think it is certainly true that you could learn quantum computing without taking a course (or learning on your own) in quantum physics, why in the world would you want to do this? Why not learn as much as you can about both “quantum” and about “computing”? This doesn’t guarantee success or anything, but I can guarantee you that it would benefit your soul (and it might even lead to things like physicists designing algorithms where scattering off a tree solves the NAND tree problem.)
(The main point of Bill’s article, of course is to ask whether quantum physicists should learn quantum computing, to which I refer the reader to Scott Aaronson’s answer in the comment section of the post.)
Postdocs, Postdocs
Ann of Caltech sends me some postdoc positions at the institute of technology:
CENTER FOR THE PHYSICS OF INFORMATION
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Postdoctoral Research Positions
The Center for the Physics of Information at the California Institute of Technology will have postdoctoral scholar positions available beginning in September 2008. Researchers interested in all aspects of the interface between information science and physical science are invited
to apply.
Please apply on-line at http://www.ist.caltech.edu/joinus/positions.html#postdoc. Electronic copies of your curriculum vitae, publication list, statement of research interests, and three letters of recommendation are required.
The deadline for receipt of all application materials is December 17, 2007.
The California Institute of Technology is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. Women, minorities, veterans and disabled persons are encouraged to apply.
INSTITUTE FOR QUANTUM INFORMATION
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Postdoctoral Research Positions
The Institute for Quantum Information at the California Institute of Technology will have postdoctoral scholar positions available beginning in September 2008. Researchers interested in all aspects of quantum information science are invited to apply.
Please apply on-line at www.iqi.caltech.edu. Electronic copies of your curriculum vitae, publication list, statement of research interests, and three letters of recommendation are required. The deadline for receipt of all application materials is December 17, 2007.
The California Institute of Technology is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. Women, Minorities, Veterans and Disabled Persons are encouraged to apply.
I’m happy to see the CEPI ad since we really need to counter the number of quantum computing “centre”s out there with the wrong spelling of the word “center”.
Back From Japan
Back from Kyoto, Japan where I attended AQIS07. What time is it right now anyway? (And is there a selective pressure in today’s scientific fields towards people who suffer less jet lag?) AQIS 2008 will be held in Seoul, South Korea.
Here is a picture of me enjoying the awesome hospitality of our hosts at a delicious dinner. This was a dinner held on top of a creek in the mountains north of Kyoto (picture thanks to the quantum computing picture achive, a.k.a Charlie Bennett).
There we a lot of good talks at AQIS, the program can be found here. My favorite line of the entire conference was definitely when one quantum information theorist responded, when asking why a particular quantity was used in a proof, “because we are trying to keep Bob from doing something stupid.” Something about designing proofs guided by keeping the protocol participants from being stupid struck me as quite funny.
The talk which I liked the most was probably the talk by Alexandre Blais (Université de Sherbrooke) on coupling superconducting qubits to microwaves. Much fantastic work has been recently performed (most?) at Yale on coupling superconducting qubits to microwaves (see here for example.) What is cool about this setup is that one can achieve coupling between the superconducting qubits and light which is in a strong-coupling limit, much as is done in cavity QED. Strong-coupling means that the light and qubit coupling is much stronger than other couplings of these two systems to the rest of the world (i.e. such as the rate at which the qubit decoheres or the photons leak out of the cavity you are using.) In particular this allows for very robust coupling/transmission of quantum information between the superconducting qubit and light. What was exciting about Alexandre’s talk was at the end of his talk about recent experimental results from Yale to be published soon about the coupling of two superconducting qubits to each other using the microwave field as an intermediary. Very cool stuff. It seems to me that this offers many of the benefits of traditional cavity QED for building a quantum computer, but in a much more scalable manner than is achievable in cavity QED. It definitely will be interesting to watch as these systems become better characterized and as more complex devices get implemented.
Update: This work is now on the archive at 0708.2135. I