Via quantumbiodiscs I learn that Google Book Search now has full out-of-copyright books in full form. A search for “quantum computer” yields four books, one of which is “Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life.” It seems that quantum computing is at least receiving a nice reception among Kabbalists.
Speculation Wednesdays
Okay, so those of you who know me know I love Fermi’s Paradox: “Where are they?” (And by “they” I mean extraterristrials, not some other they, like, physics and literature majors. I guess I’m more attuned to noticing that later odd specimen, but you’d be amazed at how popular that combination is.) One variant of the answer to Fermi’s Paradox is simply that the E.T.s are so advanced that they don’t really give a poop about us. Today I was pondering what could possibly make an E.T. think that we are so boring, so ordinary, that we were like specks of nothing in their eyes. And I thought, well maybe there is a computer science meets physics answer to this question!
A few years ago, we had this beautiful complexity class, BPP, of stuff that our ordinary computers could handle. Today we speculate that there is a slightly large complexity class which “ordinary” (and by ordinary I mean super challenging today, but possibly simple in the future) computers can handle: BQP. Now, suppose that this continues. As we probe deeper into the laws of physics we discover that we gain more and more computational power. We could even speculate that, there is a point where our physical laws allow us to solve NP-complete problems effeciently (that popping sound you just heard was Scott’s head.) As Lance and Scott has so beautifully pointed out, the consequences of this would be a reduction of large chunks of our culture to tractable problems. So if it were indeed true that physical allows for the efficient solution to NP-complete problems, then a society like ours, with our piddly classical computers and even our piddly future quantum computers, and our silly little things like the plays of Shakespeare are pretty boring objects. Large cunks of our society become nothing more than something which can be achieved on an alien laptop computer. Why bother visiting the Earth when not much interesting is occuring there which cannot be made a tractable problem on your computer.
Now of course, we know that NP is just one of a tower of higher and higher complexity classes (I would called it a zoo, but then I’d have to believe that a flood was near and that soon some some brave complexity theorist (who has a severe drinking problem) would have to pack up all the complexity classes, and their complements, into an ark in order to survive a flood which whipes out all other complexity theorists.) So even these luckily aliens who have access to a NP-complete solving computer and who therefore totally ignore us, might have their own Fermi Paradox? Are their levels of aliens all ignoring their lesser beings because of the weakness of the complexity classes their computers can efficiently solve?
Tis the Season for Awards
Congrats to Christian Weedbrook, Thomas Symul, Andrew Lance, and Ping Koy Lam from the University of Queensland and the Australian National University for winning the University of New South Wales Eureka Prize for Scientific Research for research on quantum cryptography.
Quantum Caribbean
French Caribbean anyone? The First International Conference on Quantum, Nano, and Micro Technologies, ICQNM 2007 to be held on Guadeloupes.
Awards
Fields Medals: Okounkov, Perelman, Tao, Werner. I was excited to see Terence Tao win because I’ve actually read and understood one of his papers. Not the stuff he’s winning the Medal for, of course. See Michael Nielsen (rising from his deep silence 😉 ) for connections of Tao’s work to quantum information science (by Hayden, Daftuar, and Klyachko.) Perelman has, apparently, declined the Medal and the arxiv is stressed by people downloading his papers:
22 Aug 2006: arXiv.org servers are currently under very heavy load due to demand for Grisha Perelman’s papers, published only as arXiv.org e-prints, which are available below. We encourage you to use a mirror such as lanl.arXiv.org or aps.arXiv.org, and we thank you for your patience as we try to accommodate the demand. Perleman was named a Fields Medalist at the opening ceremony of the International Mathematical Union.
Nevanlinna Medal: Jon Kleinberg.
Gauss Prize: Kiyoshi Ito. And the quants rejoice!
rose.blog
A new quantum computing blog! Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave (the British Columbia company questing to build a quantum computer) now has a blog called rose.blog. Geordie certainly named the blog after his last name, but when I read that title, I hear “Rosebud” and want to go sledding.
Dirac Medal to Zoller
Congrats to Peter Zoller from the University of Innsbruck for winning the Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Here is the announcement on their webpage:
Peter Zoller, professor of physics at the University of Innsbruck and scientific director of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has won the Dirac Medal 2006. Zoller is being honoured for his innovative and prolific accomplishments in atomic physics, including his seminal work in proposing methods to use trapped ions for quantum computing and describing how to realize the Bose-Hubbard model and associated phase transitions in ultracold gases
I’ve even heard some experimental physicists blaspheme that the Cirac-Zoller proposal for ion trap quantum computing was as important as Peter Shor’s algorithm in getting quantum computing jumpstarted! Previous winners of the Medal include a laundry list of great theoretical physicists, including Ed Witten (in 1985), and someone who now does work in quantum computing, Jeffrey Goldstone (in 1991).
Interestingly, you are inelligible for the Dirac Medal of the ICTP if you have won a Nobel Prize, a Fields Medal, or a Wolf Prize (Witten won his Dirac Medal before he won his Fields Medal.) Just to avoid confusion this is different from the Paul Dirac Medal and Prize awarded by the Institute of Physics.
Fun With Author Names
Today I was entering an article into BibTeX about an NMR quantum computing experiment. The article entry was published in May and has the BibTeX entry
@article{Negreverge:06a,
title={Benchmarking Quantum Control Methods on a 12-Qubit System},
author={C. Negrevergne and T. S. Mahesh and C. A. Ryan and M. Ditty and F. Cyr-Racine and W. Power and N. Boulant and T. Havel and D. G. Cory and R. Laflamme},
journal=prl,
volume=96,
pages=170501,
year=2006
}
Okay, what’s so interesting about this? Well suppose that you cite this article in a LaTeX article using the alphabetical labeling scheme favored by computer scientists. What does the citation look like? It looks like [NMR+06]! Awesome.
Postdoc Position
Anyone crazy enough to be interested in a postdoctoral position doing quantum computing theory here at UW should email me (dabacon[[[at]]]gmail.com subject: postdoc) for more details. Sure you could do a postdoc at the blackberry hole of quantum computing 😉 or at one of the insane asylums..errr I mean Institutes 😉 , but then you’d be a fish in a crowded pond. Here at UW you cold be a fish in a lovely Koi pond nearly all your own 🙂 And Seattle is indeed a lovely Koi pond.
Note: UW is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer.
Not Replacing, Enhancing!
Long article appearing on CNNmoney written for Fortune magazine on quantum computers. My favorite quote from the article:
But quantum computing scientists are surprisingly bullish, for scientists. “This is the most exciting time of my life, and I’m not young,” says Eli Yablonovitch, professor of electrical engineering at UCLA. “We’re looking forward to a direct impact on everybody in the world.”
And the most interesting quote is
Granted, changing the spin of an electron is a long way from building a circuit out of the same, and history is littered with promising technologies that didn’t pan out. Intel CEO Paul Otellini is one major quantum skeptic, increasingly reluctant to fund R&D for it. Reports of the death of silicon have been greatly exaggerated, he says
What is interesting, I think is that the article makes it sound like Paul Otellini thinks that quantum computers are somehow meant to be computers “beyond Moore’s law,” i.e. as a technology that moves beyond today’s Silicon based transistor technology. I think this is kind of crazy. The point of quantum computers is not that they will be “beyond Moore” but that there is an entirely new form of computing beyond the form of computing we are executing today. I’m skeptical of quantum computers as devices “beyond Moore’s law” too, mostly because I figure there is always a factor in the error correction needed to achieve quantum error correction over classical error correction. Thus any quantum computer I design, say from the single spin up, could probalby be put to use as a classical computer with less overhead needed for error correction. I think this view of quantum computers comes about because an argument made for quantum computing is usually to put up Moore’s law and point out that if it continues, it will eventually make atom sized transistors. This is kind of a silly argument and hides the idea that the reason you build a quantum computer is because it is an entirely new form of computation.