D-wave In D-news

Lots of blogging and press picking up on D-wave and Orion so I thought I’d collect a few here. The offical press release is here. I’d love to hear from anyone who has attended.
Scott Aaronson called me a Chinese restraraunt placemat in his The Orion Quantum Computer Anti-Hype FAQ (Update (3:17pm 2/13/07): Scott’s post now contains an update by the great Lawrence Ip, who now works for Google.) Doug Natelson, who gave an excellent talk here at UW a few weeks ago, poses three questions about the D-wave demo. Peter Rhode is every bit the skeptic and beats out Doug Natelson with four points. Ars-technica’s Chris Lee takes a shot at explaining adiabatic quantum computation and uses the word deathmatch here. You can find a bad quantum computing joke at the end of this blog post. I find this post amusing, if for nothing more than bringing politics into quantum computing. Coherence* remains the prettiest quantum computing website and has a choice Seth Lloyd comment “I’ll be a bit of a skeptic until I see what they have done. I’m happy these guys are doing it. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
More mainstreamish media produces some truely incredible hype. One of my favorites is at physorg.com where we find the title a “New supercomputer to be unveiled” along with the choice gibberish “A Canadian firm is claiming to have taken a quantum leap in technology by producing a computer that can perform 64,000 calculations at once.” I flipped a coin 16 times today, can I get some venture capital? 🙂 Personally I like Gizmodo’s title: “D-Wave Quantum Computer to Span Multiple Universes Next Tuesday?” They also use the word sugerdaddy. If you want more reasons to be angry about hype or at bad journalism, go over to a wired gadget blog where you’ll find

There are certain classes of problems that can’t be solved with digital computers,” said Herb Martin, the firm’s CEO, over a decidedly-noisy digital cell phone. “Digital computers are good at running programs; quantum computers are good at handling massive sets of variables.”

Turing is certainly turning in his grave over that first sentence and, since Peter Shor is alive and well, I wonder if he is spinning today?
And don’t even get me started on this EETimes article. Choice:

Nondeterministic polynomial (NP) problems are the most difficult to solve on conventional computers because each variable adds yet another dimension to its possible solutions.

No, no, no! So many no’s I can’t even write it down. First of all NP problems include problems in P, so they definitely aren’t the most difficult to solve on a conventional computer. Second, the essentence of NP-complete problems is NOT just that you have an exponential search space. You’d think a Electrical Engineering rag would have taken some computer science courses? Then, of course EETimes only digs their grave deeper:

Quantum computers, on the other hand, can evaluate all possible solutions simultaneously and find the optimal solution, often in just a few clock cycles, thereby not only vastly speeding up the time taken to find the solution but also finding the most optimal result.

Okay, at that point I’ll admit I had to stop reading cus my brain was about to explode.
Oh, and whatever you do, don’t search for “first quantum computer” if you’ve ever performed a quantum computing experiment (that includes a lot of MIT Physics majors? Ack, is NMR quantum computation really quantum computation?) You might get a little miffed at all the years you spent in grad school doing what you thought were small quantum computer experiments.

One Link, Many Link, Social Link

Just back from an awesome lecture by Raghu Ramakrishnan (Yahoo Research/U Wisconsin) entitled “Community Systems: The World Online.” Wow. The talk should be online here soon. In my head I’ve always kind of associated social websites like flicker, youtube, etc as “stuff for fun” so to speak. But Raghu makes a strong case, I think that these sorts of websites are actually the manner in which make the next step towards improving the responsiveness of the web. Okay so maybe that wasn’t his main point, but I’d like to argue that this idea was a valid conclusion to draw from his talk. Indeed, some might even claim that the new boom (Are we at the beginning? Hop on quick youngsters!) in websites with a “social” aspect (by which I mean all sites which have a community aspect, not just those with a “social” component) is all about the increased usefulness of exploiting the community link networks for increased functionality on using the web. It is almost like, as Google moved beyond Altavista (and others) use of one link in anchor text to many links, these social sites are experience a similar revolution in the mining of the community information links beyond the simple one link stage.

International Very Nearly Linear Colider

Article on a press release about the details of the International Linear Colider. Errr…well sort of linear 😉 :

One unusual twist to the design, said Dr. Barish, is that the tunnels, rather than being laser straight through the ground, would curve with the Earth. “It isn’t obvious and it took us a while to demonstrate that we could actually design a machine that bends” he said, but that feature would allow the digging to stay within the same geologic layers and prevent liquid cryogenics from wanting to flow “downhill” from one part of the tunnel to another.

Quantum Engineering Sounds Fun

I missed this last year, but Yale has established a Institute for Nanoscience and Quantum Engineering. Who will be the first to file out a tax for with “Occupation: Quantum Engineer?”
Update: Oh, and I missed this one too. The University of Maryland, NIST, and the NSA have established the Joint Quantum Institute under the direction of Christopher J. Lobb and Carl J. Williams. It will be hard for west coast types to avoid jokes about what they are smoking at this institute, won’t it? 🙂

Talk Next Week

For local Seattlites the following shameless self promotion message 🙂 Next Tuesday at 4pm I’m giving a talk in the Physics department (C421 Physics/Astronomy Building) for the Condensed Matter and Atomic (CMA) Physics Seminar. The title of the talk is “When Physics and Computer Science Collide: A Cross Cultural Extravaganza” and the abstract is

In 1994 Peter Shor discovered that computers operating according to quantum principles could efficiently factor integers and hence break many modern cryptosystems. Since this time researchers from disciplines–physics, computer science, chemistry, and mathematics–have been engaged in building an entirely new discipline now known as quantum information science. Being a highly interdisciplinary endeavor, quantum information science requires not just mastery of physics or of computer science, but an ability to take insights from both fields across the cultural divide. In this talk I will discuss how physicists can contribute to the computer science side of quantum computing and how computer scientists can contribute to the physics side of quantum computing via a series of vignettes taken from research in my group here at UW.

Upgraded

Just upgraded to Vista. Woot, no problems so far. Yeah, living in Seattle you just fall deeper and deeper into the “evil empire.” But it’s still fun to wave to Bill Gates when you go over the 520 bridge. And the real question is, how will Bill commute to the new Bill and Melinda Gates building which is closer to where I live? Maybe he will buy us a new bridge?
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