O brave new quantum world!
We promise we’ll finish posting these soon! Day 3 was only a half day of talks with a free afternoon, and the rainy weather of the first two days finally subsided just in time. Jean-Pierre Tillich Decoding Quantum LDPC Codes abstract LDPC codes are families of sparse codes, meaning that the stabilizers are all low …
From the team that brought you “QIP 2015 Day 1 liveblogging“, here is the exciting sequel. Will they build a quantum computer? Will any complexity classes collapse? Will any results depend on the validity of the Extended Riemann Hypothesis? Read on and find out! Praise from a reader of “day 1”: QIP 2015 liveblogging — …
Jan 14 update at the end. The three Pontiffs are reunited at QIP 2015 and, having forgotten how painful liveblogging was in the past, are doing it again. This time we will aim for some slightly more selective comments. In an ideal world the QIP PC would have written these sorts of summaries and posted …
Continue reading “QIP 2015 Return of the Live-blogging, Day 1”
To everyone that’s attending QIP, welcome to Sydney! Since I’ve already had to clarify a number of the finer points of Australian slang to my fellow attendees, I thought I would solve the general problem and simply post a helpful dictionary that translates some uniquely Australian words and usages into standard American English. Also, this thing on the right is …
Continue reading “Your Guide to Australian Slang for QIP Sydney”
Perhaps the greatest shock I’ve had in moving from the hallowed halls of academia to the workman depths of everyday software development is the amount of testing that is done when writing code. Likely I’ve written more test code than non-test code over the last three plus years at Google. The most common type of …
A really exciting paper appeared on the arxiv today: A proposal for self-correcting stabilizer quantum memories in 3 dimensions (or slightly less), by Courtney Brell. It gives the strongest evidence yet that self-correcting quantum memories are possible in “physically realistic” three-dimensional lattice models. In particular, Courtney has constructed families of local Hamiltonians in 3D whose terms consist of …
Lance Fortnow has a post summarizing some of the news affecting the CS community over the past month, including updates on various prizes as well as the significant media attention focusing on physics- and math-related topics such as movies about Turing and Hawking as well as Terrence Tao on the Colbert Report. From his post, I just …
Continue reading “A Breakthrough Donation for Computer Science”
This morning I awoke to the horrible news that Caltech Physics Professor Tom Tombrello had passed away. Professor Tombrello was my undergraduate advisor, my research advisor, a mentor, and, most importantly a friend. His impact on me, from my career to the way I try to live my life, was profound. Because life is surreal, …
My first research project, my first research paper, was on a perplexing phenomenon: the sliding rocks of Death Valley’s Racetrack playa. Racetrack playa is a large desolate dry lake bed that has one distinguishing feature above and beyond its amazing flatness. At the south end of the playa are a large number of large rocks …
The website is up for QIP 2015, which will be held this year in beautiful Sydney, Australia. Here is a timeline of the relevant dates: Submission of talks deadline: Sep 12, 2014 Submission of posters deadline: Oct 25, 2014 Decision on talks and posters submitted before talk deadline: Oct 20, 2014 Decision on posters submitted after talk …