Still a Lot to Do

Over hyped press releases are a standard for quantum computing research and a stable of what makes me sound like a grumpy old man. Really I’m not that grumpy (really! reall!), but I always forget to post the stuff which isn’t over hyped. For example, today I stumbled upon an article about a recent experimental implementation of a code for overcoming qubit loss done in China. In this article I find a graduate student whose was able to get a reasonable quote into the article:

While optimistic critics are acclaiming the newly achieved progress, the team, however, is cautiously calm. “There are still a lot to do before we can build a practically workable quantum computer. Qubit loss is not the only problem for QC; other types of decoherence are to be overcome,” remarks LU Chaoyang, a PhD student with the team. “But good news is, the loss-tolerant quantum codes demonstrated in our work can be further concatenated with other quantum error correction codes or decoherence-free space to tackle multiple decoherence, and may become a useful part for future implementations of quantum algorithms.”

Ah, that makes me happy.

National Medal of Science

David Wineland, laser cooling god and ion trap quantum computer builder extraordinaire, has been awarded the National Medal of Science. Much awesomeness.
Also winning the medal this year is a name familiar to computer scientists and engineers worldwide, or simply who have spent time at USC: Andrew Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm and cofounder of Qualcom, among other notable achievements.