The survey of abused words in quantum computing shows the word “exponential” as having an, um, exponential, lead over its competitors. My own personal choice for the most abused word was “scalable,” a word that is, in my opinion, the least debated, but most important, concept in quantum computing today. A word which everyone uses but whose definition is strangely missing from all almost all papers that use the word. Here are some thoughts on this word, what it means to particular groups, and what I, in my own pomposity, think the word really should mean.
Note the title of this post is ripped off from the title of quant-ph/0204157, a classic paper on “scalability” in quantum computing.
Continue reading “Climbing Mt. Scalable”
Reducing Computer Power Consumption
Wow, this is a very cool result:
Researchers at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkstown, NY have announced a breakthrough which they feel could revolutionize power consumption in computers. Today’s computers are power hungry: a typical computer consumes hundreds of watts of power. Not only does this power consumption add up to a lot of wasted power, but increasingly the amount of heat generated by the machines is a significant barrier to building faster more powerful computers. The researchers at IBM say they’ve made a breakthrough in how computers consume power which will dramatically lower power consumption at the cost of only slightly longer time to perform computations.
“Computation is inherently a power consuming process. Every time a transistor performs a calculation in your computer, you generate a little bit of heat. Want to add two plus two? That will cost you some energy,” said lead researcher Charlie Tennett in explaining the teams new approach. “But what we realized was, that this is a two way street. What happens if, instead of adding two plus two, you take four and break it up into two twos?”
The heart of the IBM researchers breakthrough is the observation that if “computing” costs energy then “uncomputing” can be used to generate energy. “By performing a computation, copying the answer, and then unperforming the computation, we only consume power during the copying procees” says Dr. Tennett. “Since that copying doesn’t consume much energy we get huge efficiencies in power consumption.”
As a demonstration of this breakthrough, Dr. Tennett showed a prototype computer built by team members John Swolin and Barbara Shareal. “We took an ordinary laptop and changed its programming. Every time we execute a program on the computer, the program copies over the answer and then does the same program, but running backward. We then hooked up our laptop to a power meter, and watched, in amazement, as almost all of the power consumed by the program was fed back into the electrical system when we ran the program backward!”
The team believes that there is a great potential for the use of their technology even in fields outside of computation. “Think of all the vast amounts of computation that has been performed over the last few decades,” dreams Dr. Tennett, “if we could just undo all of those computations, we could easily ween America off of its oil addition.”
Augmented Reality Baseball Cards
No kidding:
Whiteboard Pong
Original McEliece Cracked
Shor’s algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor’s algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor’s algorithm break a plethora of other public key cryptosystems, including those based on elliptic curves. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few public key cryptosystems where variations on Shor’s algorithm do not break the cryptosystem. Thus it has been suggested that the McEliece cryptosystem might be a suitable cryptosystem in the “post quantum world”, i.e. for a world where a quantum computer is built (and if your a commenter who wishes to simply post the quantum computers are like string theory, please…save your keystrokes.)
Continue reading “Original McEliece Cracked”
Google Battles Drunk Emails
A priceless new email feature for gmail: Mail Goggles:
Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.
When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?
Now if only Google would add a similar feature for those hitting the reply to all button (instead they apparently have a function to make it the default reply option. Doh!)
John McCain v RIM
This morning, John McCain’s top economic adviser made a bit of a mistake:
Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.
“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”
Al Gore, call your office.
(Courtesy of Amie Parnes, on the trail with McCain)
Great fodder for the late night television hosts, considering the fact that Research In Motion is a Canadian company funded by the Canadian institutional investors. Maybe this is really a foreign policy announcement that John McCain supports invading the 51st state Canada. If he can get this going before the election, I’m pretty sure that his selection of Palin as a VP candidate will be seen as forward looking, because I’ve been told that as Alaska goes, so goes Canada.
But what amazes me more is how quickly wikipedia gets updated.
Continue reading “John McCain v RIM”
Happy Birthday Integrated Circuit!
Fifty years ago today, this device
set the course for a pretty big revolution. That’s a picture of Jack Kilby’s first integrated circuit which first functioned on September 12, 1958.
Not Cuil
Sure quantum computers can find a needle in an unstructured haystack quadratically faster than their classical brethren, but I didn’t think the word “quantum” and “search” would appear in the press quite this soon: Ex-Googlers reinvent web search: Quantum porn (not safe for work! i.e. they show the quantum porn!) and Quantum porn engine foiled by strawberries and muffins: How the Cuil kids live. And yes, I “cuil”ed my own name, and no, this blog doesn’t come up (nor any quantum porn.)
Web Based Applications
You know that web based applications have really entered into your life when you click the Firefox icon and you wonder why the browser doesn’t appear and cover the document you are editing.