pontiff
Posts by this author
September 3, 2008
What a graduate student at UW discovered when searching for Kitaev's paper on anyons:
September 2, 2008
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…
September 1, 2008
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…
September 1, 2008
The London Eye is a gigantic tourist trap rotating wheel, which you can ride to get a great view of London. The trip takes about 30 minutes. While riding it the other day, I noticed an odd illusion. The London Eye is made up of pods which are attached to the wheel in such a way that each pod is…
September 1, 2008
Ironically, of all the posts I scheduled to run while I was away on vacation last week, the only one which didn't get automatically posted was the one saying that I'd be away and that the next weeks posts would be scheduled. Doh. So yeah, I was away.
For your viewing pleasure, Greek boats
and a…
August 28, 2008
Quantum error correction and quantum hard drives in four dimension. Part IV of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing:
Prior parts: Part I, Part II, Part III.
Quantum Error Correction
Classical error correction worked by encoding classical information across…
August 26, 2008
The physics of classical information storage. Why is it that your hard drive works? A modern miracle, I tell you! Part III of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing: "self-correcting quantum computers." Prior parts: Part I, Part II
The Physics of Classical…
August 25, 2008
Why is classical computing possible at all? A silly question, but one which never ceases to amaze me. Part II of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing: "self-correcting quantum computers." Prior parts: Part I
Last time I discussed how quantum computing was…
August 21, 2008
Quantum computing is hair-brained, but then again so is classical probabilistic computing. Part I of my attempt to explain one of my main research interests in quantum computing: "self-correcting quantum computers."
Quantum Computing, a Harebrained Idea?
Quantum computing, at first sight, sounds…
August 20, 2008
QCMC 2008 is being held in Calgary this week. Anyone care to comment on any of the awesome talks or other interesting things they've heard at this fine conference? Anyone?
August 18, 2008
"Expeditions in Computing awards" are ten million dollar NSF grants from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering to pursue long-term research agendas. My favorite kinds of projects: high risk, high reward, and long term. Today the first four award winners have been…
August 12, 2008
I knew there was a reason I called this blog "The Quantum Pontiff." Amazon-ing my name:
August 12, 2008
Interested in quantum error correction (who isn't!) Daniel Lidar informs me that the talks from the QEC07 conference are now all available online.
See such amazing acts as
Tutorials
Dave Bacon [ppt][video]
Daniel Gottesman [ppt][video]
Raymond Laflamme [pdf][…
August 11, 2008
IANAE (that's I am not a person with severe physics envy but who is compensated for this fact by earning a higher salary than a physicist), but I do not understand Brad DeLong:
Traders! Read the second page of the statistical release before you press the button!
Meredith Beechey...and Jonathan…
August 11, 2008
Last week, before I headed to my current location in the land of Coca Cola and the Cartoon Network (the hotel is so nice here that when my friend stopped outside so that I could drop my bags off, the concierge asked him if he wanted would like some water while he waited), I attended a very…
August 10, 2008
Me, personally, I wake to the smell of Bacon every morning. But others may need help. Here it is: the Wakin' with Bacon alarm clock.
August 9, 2008
Say it ain't so Hasbro, say it aint so. From an NPR story on a makeover of the game "Clue":The characters have changed, too. Miss Scarlet has a first name: Cassandra. Colonel Mustard left the military; he's a former football star. Victor Plum, formerly the professor who was always known as the…
August 7, 2008
Over at Science in the open, the the ScienceOpener (Cameron Neylon) is attending BioBarCamp. Now, IANAB (that stands for "I am not a stamp collector" :) ) but there are a ton of cool talks at BioBarCamp: many on open science / social media / science 2.0 etc (for which biologists are kicking…
August 7, 2008
Summer school in November, Quantum crypto is to legit to quit, quantum Pagerank, and no prayer in quantum prayer.
An email about a summer school in Australia:Dear Colleagues
Please forgive us if you receive this multiple times...
We would like to circulate notice of the inaugural 2008 Asher Peres…
August 6, 2008
Hot off the presses!In an amazing breakthrough, which this press release has no room to describe in any real detail, scientists at research university BigU have made tremendous progress in the field of quantum computing. The results mean that quantum computers are one step closer to replacing your…
August 6, 2008
A very cool discovery out of Caltech: auditory synesthesia. Synesthesia, you probably know, is an effect wherein the stimulation of one sense causes automatic sensations in another sense. For example, grapheme-color synesthesia is where numbers or letters appear to those observing to be shaded or…
August 5, 2008
Physics and Physicists points to an article: "The Einstein formula: E_0=mc^2 'Isn't the Lord laughing?'" by L.B. Okun on confusion about Einstein's famous mass and energy formula.Abstract:The article traces the way Einstein formulated the relation between energy and mass in his work from 1905 to…
August 5, 2008
Summary of what's new and happening on the arXivs according to voters on SciRate.
0807.4935 (15 scites) "Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels" by Graeme Smith and Jon Yard.
I blogged about this article here.
0807.4753 (9 scites) "Counterexamples to the maximal p-norm multiplicativity…
August 5, 2008
MIT has won a three million dollar NSF grant for a interdisciplinary graduate training program for quantum information science. The program will be called iQuISE and will be lead by Isaac Chuang along with Seth Lloyd and Jeffery Shapiro. Now the real question is how the heck do you pronounce…
August 4, 2008
Yep, it's paper dance time. This one is less of a dance and more of a shuffle:
arXiv:0808.0174 (scirate)
Title: Simon's Algorithm, Clebsch-Gordan Sieves, and Hidden Symmetries of Multiple Squares
Author: D. Bacon
Abstract: The first quantum algorithm to offer an exponential speedup (in the query…
August 4, 2008
Michael Nielsen has a nice essay up explaining Why the world needs quantum mechanics:Conventional wisdom holds that quantum mechanics is hard to learn. This is more or less correct, although often overstated. However, the necessity of abandoning conventional ways of thinking about the world, and…
August 1, 2008
John Baez points to a remarkable mathematician (having being lead there by Alissa Crans):
You may have heard of the Mathematics Genealogy Project. This is a wonderful database that lets you look up the Ph.D. advisor and students of almost any mathematician. This is how I traced back my genealogy…
August 1, 2008
For those of you who aren't afraid of "uberconnected web 2.0"-ing, I've set up a quantum computing room on friendfeed. "For those with nothing better to do than contemplate the one true theory of computation."