One of the cool talks at the northwest APS meeting I attend a little over a week ago was a talk by Mark Beck from Whitman college on implementing Hardy’s test of local realism in an undergraduate lab. I sure wish I’d had this lab when I was an undergraduate (as it is I most remember a lab in which we made a high temperature superconductor…mostly due, unfortunately, to the ungodly amount of time we spent trying to get the stuff to superconduct!) There aren’t many labs where you can get your hands on an experiment related to quantum informatino information processing, are there. In fact the only other one I know of is in the Junior lab at MIT where they do an NMR quantum computing experiment. Anyone know of any other undergraduate labs which are relevant to quantum computing?
Neologistas
What do you call a blog entry whose only content is a link to another blog post? I suggest calling such posts throughposts.
A Puzzling Class Obmission
I was an undergraduate at Caltech, which is located in southern California in the city of Pasadena. This meant that when I went home for the holidays, I would have to drive ten hours north to my home in Yreka, California (by the way, the San Francisco bay area is NOT Northern California!) Along the way I would often stop to pick up my friend Luis who was going to school in Berkeley. Even from Berkeley the drive to Yreka is about five hours. So what would we do during this long drive? Puzzles. Riddles. Brain teasers. Five hours of brain busting fun! And on the way back: five more hours of brain busting fun! Which got me thinking the other day: why aren’t there classes in puzzles and games? I mean I have no doubt that doing these teasers, even at my advanced age, is good for my brain. Actually, come to think of it, especially at my advanced age! It seems kind of strange to me that such an important tool for keeping your brain sharp is so completely (at least as far as I’ve seen) ignored by higher education. I’m not sure what can be done about this puzzling obmission from education, but certainly it would be excellent to teach a class in puzzles, brain teasers, and games. Plus there is the added benefit that it might increase your chances of getting hired at a hedge fund 😉
Third Mersenne Prime
Today is my birthday and I am the third Mersenne prime years old. I am skeptical that I will make the fourth Mersenne prime. And I am certain that I will not make the 43rd (?): [tex]$2^{30402457}-1$[/tex]!
A Visitor
For those of you local to Seattle, Scott Aaronson, keeper of the complexity zoo, will be giving a talk this Thursday:
Event: Colloquium, 05/25/2006 11:30 am, Gates Commons, CSE 691
Speaker: Scott Aaronson (University of Waterloo)
Talk: The Learnability of Quantum States
Abstract: Using ideas from computational learning theory, I’ll show
that “for most practical purposes,” one can learn a quantum state
using a number of measurements that grows only linearly with the
number of qubits n. By contrast, traditional quantum state tomography
requires a number of measurements that grows exponentially with n.
I’ll then give two applications of this learning theorem to quantum
computing: first, the use of trusted classical advice to verify
untrusted quantum advice, and second, a new simulation of quantum
one-way protocols.
Even though there exists an algorithm to “learn” a quantum state after
a small number of measurements, that algorithm might not be efficient
computationally. As time permits, I’ll discuss ongoing work on how to
exploit that fact to copy-protect and obfuscate quantum software
Holy Grails
From article entitled “Bright Outlook for Queenland Nanotechnology Alliance”:
…their efforts are focused on making a significant impact into solving many of the holy grails, such as clean energy, personalised medicine and quantum computing.
Well I’m not sure if quantum computing is a hoy grail, but I’m pretty sure quantum computing researchers all know and laugh at “The Holy Grail.”
Tale of Two Conferences
Right now I’m in the middle of an incredibly strange transition. Friday and Saturday the Northwest Section of the American Physical Society had its annual conference in Tacoma (at the University of Puget Sound: what an acronym, eh?) This conference was full of all sorts of cool physics, astronomy, and even the history of physics (did you know that graphs were not really used until the mid to late nineteenth century. How strange?!) Starting this evening, I’ll be attending the 38th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing which is being held here in Seattle. I’m sure the next few days will be filled with all sorts of cool theoretical computer science. Now I’m faced with getting my brain to move from an experiment involving electromagnetically induced transparency to understanding capacity achieving list decoding codes. So if my bloggings seem a little random, well, you’ll know that this transition has fried my brain.
$-Wave
Okay, we will officially call this week “D-wave week.” According to an article here (update: for a link that may work for all browsers, see here), D-wave just secured another round of financing, to the tune of $14,000,000.
Not Quite That Wide
An article today in the New York Times describes a cool experiment with “backwards propogating light.” It’s a cool experiment, but what I love best from the article is the following line:
However, the pulses were in a shape known as Gaussian, which is, in principle, infinite in width, though in practice not quite that wide.
Winner of the understatement of the year?
Topological Phases and Quantum Computation
The KITP is hosting a conference on Topological Phases and Quantum Computation which starts today. The talks should be appearing online this week here. Wish I could be there, but hopefully most of the talks will appear online, thus allowing the teaching bound like me to follow the conference from afar.