Free Thought
pontiff | August 1, 2008For 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."
goodmath | July 30, 2008
Moving on from simple zero-sum games, there are a bunch of directions in which
we can go. So far, the games we've looked at are very restrictive. Beyond the
zero-sum property, they're built on a set of fundamental properties which ultimately
reduce to the idea that no player ever has an information advantage over any other
player: the complete payoff matrix is known by all players; no player gets
to see the other players strategy before selecting their own; and so on.
Moving on to more interesting games, we can relax those assumptions, and allow information to be hidden. Perhaps each…
cortex | July 29, 2008Sheena Iyengar has done some very cool studies on the debilitating effects of excessive choice. In one experiment, she ushered some undergraduates into a room with a variety of Godiva chocolates on a table. The students were then given vivid descriptions of each candy. They learned, for example, that the "Grand Marnier Truffle" consists of a "luxurious milk chocolate butter cream with a hint of liquor, housed in a dark chocolate shell and rolled in cocoa powder." After being told about all of their delectable options, the students chose the best sounding chocolate and rated it on a scale of…
pontiff | July 28, 2008In attempt to keep my reading more current, I'm going to try to post the top rated arXiv papers on SciRate each week and hopefully add about the papers. Let's see how long I can keep it up (bets?)
0807.2668 (7 scites) "Mixing doubly stochastic quantum channels with the completely depolarizing channel" by John Watrous.
QP says: A large variety of open quantum system evolutions are describable using the superoperator formalism. A superoperator is a linear map from a space of linear operators to another space of linear operators. The ones we care most about in quantum computing are the…
apalazzo | July 27, 2008Now that I have a good chunk of time where I'm not scheduled to run off to some distant land for vacation or to give some talk, I have decided to work extra hard. Right now I'm incubating my samples. This post is the result of me killing that time.
I want to bring up an article that appeared n WIRED over a month ago. I know, that's ancient history in the world of blogs, but it's an idea that pops up once in a while and it is common in certain young naive scientists. Let me just quote a passage from the article:
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace…
goodmath | July 24, 2008
There's one kind of semi-mathematical crackpottery that people frequently send to me, but which i generally don't write about. Given my background, I call it gematria - but it covers a much wider range than what's really technically meant by that term. Another good name for it would be numeric pareidolia. It's been a long time since I've written about this kind of stuff, and someone just sent me a pretty typical example, so what the hell. It revolves around a mess that he put together as an image, which is pretty much a classic example of obsessive silliness.
The general idea of this kind…
neurophilosophy | July 23, 2008
I'm back in London now, after 5 days in Barcelona for ESOF2008. The trip has been rather hectic, and I neither attended as many sessions, nor saw as much of the city, as I would have liked. I still had a very nice time, but, as is always the case when travelling, it's good to be home. I still have more material on the event, so I'll continue to post about it for the next few days.
During my time in Barcelona, Tobias Maier was kind enough to act as my host. Tobias and I met every day in the conference centre, attended a couple of functions together, and hit the town in the evenings. One…
gregladen | July 16, 2008This beats running in one of those crazy marathons...
Apparently, folding proteins is rather difficult. Or at least, the computational simulation of protein folding is processor intensive. So this is a job that has been worked up into a system that allows regular people like you and me to participate in, using our home computer to take part in curing Alzheimers, Huntington's Parkinsons, and everything.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every…
pontiff | July 14, 2008Ed Lazowska has penned an article over at the CCC blog about the state of computer science enrollments which is well worth reading.
My favorite part of the post is where Ed points out that the "news" reported in the "news" is not really "news":
The Taulbee Survey "headline" this year was (roughly) "computer science bachelors degrees drop again." In my view, this is not news -- it was entirely predictable from the legitimate headline four years ago: (roughly) "freshman interest and new enrollments drop again." The actual news right now in the CRA data is that freshman interest and new…
pontiff | July 10, 2008An interesting interview with Christos Papadimitriou (recent winner of the Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence) on Dr. Dobb's Journal. On chess and backgammon:
In chess, when you play like an idiot, you always lose, so you learn. In backgammon, you can play 10 games, not play well, and win. So you think you are great but you have made a great number of mistakes. Tragically, life is closer to backgammon, because you can play a perfect game and lose!
Which made me wonder which game is the closest game to "real life?" (Okay I'll dispense with the obvious answer which is the board game "…
goodmath | July 4, 2008 Once again, there's a silly article somewhere, and everyone hammers me with requests to write about it. It's frankly flattering that people see
this sort of nonsense, and immediately think of asking me about it - you folks are going to give me a swelled head!
The article in question is a recent article from Wired magazine, titled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete".
The basic idea behind the article is that now that we can retrieve and
analyze truly massive quantities of data, that the whole scientific idea of trying understand why and how things work…
omnibrain | July 3, 2008 Hitachi recently announced that they would be producing a 5 TB drive in the near future (2010?). This is totally unexciting to me but what Hitchachi's Yoshiro Shiroishi said was. According to Techradar:
As for what can be stored on such disks, Hitachi's Yoshihiro Shiroishi explains, "By 2010, just two disks will suffice to provide the same storage capacity as the human brain."
In other words, a next-generation hard drive will be able to recall that trip to the seaside in 1976, but never where it left the car keys last night.
Ignoring the faulty memory comment for a moment - Where in the…
pontiff | July 3, 2008I can taste the green chilies and after conference ski trip already:
QIP 2009 -- 12th WORKSHOP ON QUANTUM INFORMATION PROCESSING
Santa Fe, New Mexico USA. January 12-16, 2009.
http://qipworkshop.org
................................................................
First call for papers
................................................................
IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission deadline for talks: October 20, 2008, 23:59 GMT.
Acceptance notification for talks: November 20, 2008.
Submission deadline for posters: December 1, 2008.
Acceptance notification for posters…
gregladen | July 1, 2008Among the top five hundred super computing sites, the vast majority are running Linux. For the desktop environment, there are many opportunities for Linux. For audio, have a look at 42 of the Best Free Linux Audio Software. More broadly, consider these Seven Reasons to Move to Linux. The world of Linux distros is dynamic and stable. The most recent Surprise Desktop Linux Move: Xandros Buys Linspire. It should be no surprise that Linux experiences 'prolific' growth, says Linux Foundation's Zemlin.
Meanwhile, Microsoft tactics push India toward Linux.
drorzel | June 27, 2008Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees.
You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I'm going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no less...), I better have some opinions..
The original post is very long, but can probably best be summarized by the following paragraph:
My thesis is that it's not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don't have the…
catdynamics | June 25, 2008Who is Obama's Science Adviser?
Obama seems to have number of technology advisers:
Julius Genachowski, former FCC, on communications;
Alec Ross showed up at the science debate by proxy, but he is really a computing and networks guy,
Larry Lessig at Stanford and Daniel Weitzner at MIT are also apparently Obama tech advisers, but they're both, again computing/tech oriented.
So, who is giving Obama advise on climate change, stem cells, NIH funding, America Competes, NASA science and exploration, DoE funding, NSF baseline?
Should be someone getting into the campaign for actual science, as…
pontiff | June 25, 2008One of the most interesting talks that many of us in the quantum computing world have seen is the talk by Manny Knill on fault-tolerant quantum computing. Above and beyond the interesting content, what was cool about this talk was that, as far as I could tell Knill used a linked PDF for the talk. That way if he needed to delve into deeper details on a particular subject, he could. While for some talks, like colloquiums, I don't see the need for this, for technical talks before a more informal audience, this, I think is a great tool. Now, having discovered TiddlyWiki, I wonder if it isn't…
goodmath | June 24, 2008 So I hear, via the Panda's Thumb, that Uncommon Descent has a new
poster. And he's off to a rollicking good start, with a post
explaining why Christians who accept the fact of evolution are
incoherent and deluded. (As usual, I don't link to UD, due to their rampant
dishonesty in silently altering or removing links.)
I am, perhaps, not the best person to respond to his claim, given
that I'm not a Christian. But his argument is so inconsistent, and so
typical of a type of argument that constantly occurs in fundamentalist
gibberings that it doesn't take a Christian theistic evolutionist
to…
tlambert | June 23, 2008The punditariat at the Australian has lashed out at bloggers yet again (see here and here for previous examples). This time it's David Burchell, whose thesis is that all bloggers provide is a "vast outpouring of pseudo-expertise and vituperation". Naturally bloggers have responded, with Gary Sauer-Thompson writing
There is no attempt by Burchell to engage with any Australian political blogger. All are condemned and tossed into the waste bin without any argument. Burchell's position is one in which the reasoned arguments of Australian political bloggers on public issues is characterised by…
pontiff | June 23, 2008The first edition of the newly revamped Communications of the ACM is out. And I must say, so far I'm greatly impressed. First of all it seems that they've gotten rid of the absolutely horrible front pages for all articles that were (a) ugly (I'm not a font nazi, but sheesh that font choice was horrible!), and (b) a waste of space. This issue includes a blurb about quantum computing, an interview with the Donald Knuth, and a paper by David Shaw (yeah, THAT David Shaw) and coworkers on custom hardware for molecular dynamics simulations. Good stuff, I hope they can keep it up!