pontiff | September 3, 2008What a graduate student at UW discovered when searching for Kitaev's paper on anyons:
pontiff | September 2, 2008Over 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 recent experimental implementation of a code for overcoming qubit loss done in China. In this article I find a graduate student whose was able to get a reasonable quote into the article:
While optimistic critics are acclaiming the newly achieved progress, the team, however, is cautiously calm. "There…
pontiff | September 1, 2008David 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 Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm and cofounder of Qualcom, among other notable achievements.
pontiff | September 1, 2008The 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 always horizontal. What I noticed was that if you were going up on Eye and looked up and toward the top of the Eye, it felt as if the entire contraption was falling over (i.e. the top of the wheel seemed as if it was falling over.) Anyone have any idea what causes this disorienting effect?
(I…
pontiff | September 1, 2008Ironically, 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 Greek church
Bonus points for anyone who can identify this Greek town:
pontiff | August 28, 2008Quantum 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 multiple systems and thus protecting the information better than if it was encoded just locally. Fault-tolerant techniques extend these results to the building of actual robust classical computers. Given that quantum theory seems to be quite different from classical theory, an important question to…
pontiff | August 26, 2008The 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 Information Storage
Despite the fact that Shannon and von Neumann showed that, a least in theory, a reliable, fault-tolerant computer could be built out of faulty, probabilistic components, if we look at our classical computing devices it is not obvious that these ideas matter much. I mean really,…
pontiff | August 25, 2008Why 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 a lot like classical probabilistic computing. Given this, one can think about a question which seems silly at first: how is it possible to compute when you have a classical probabilistic computer?
Why Is Classical Computation Possible?
Classical computers are both digital and deterministic. But…
pontiff | August 21, 2008Quantum 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 like a hairbrained idea with absolutely no possible possibility of actually working in the real world. The reasons for this are plentiful, at least when you first start learning about quantum computers. Quantum states (aka wave functions) are described by a continuum of values. Uh, oh, that…
pontiff | August 20, 2008QCMC 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?
pontiff | 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 announced. The winning programs are
Open Programmable Mobile Internet 2020
The Molecular Programming Project
Understanding, Coping with and Benefiting from Intractibility
Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society
Of note for the…
pontiff | August 12, 2008I knew there was a reason I called this blog "The Quantum Pontiff." Amazon-ing my name:
pontiff | August 12, 2008Interested 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][video]
Lorenza Viola [pdf][video]
Keynote
David Cory [ppt][video] (no audio)
John Preskill [pdf][video]
Peter Shor [ppt][video]
David Wineland [ppt][video]
Invited
Robert Alicki [pdf][…
pontiff | August 11, 2008IANAE (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 Wright have details:
FRB: FEDS paper 2007-5: "Rounding and the Impact of News: A Simple Test of Market Rationality":
Abstract: Certain prominent scheduled macroeconomic news releases contain a rounded number on the first page of the release that is widely cited by newswires and the press, and a more…
pontiff | August 11, 2008Last 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 inspirational talk on open access by Jonathan Eisen. The video is now available online (lecture 2.) Well worth watching as it was a good talk laying out the case for open access to research journals (which Eisen makes sure to delineate from open science. Say the word open science, I guess, and some…
pontiff | August 10, 2008Me, personally, I wake to the smell of Bacon every morning. But others may need help. Here it is: the Wakin' with Bacon alarm clock.
pontiff | August 9, 2008Say 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 smartest man in the room, became recast as a self-made video game designer -- a dot-com billionaire.
Take that you stuffy academic professors, with your padded elbows and your pipes and your uncombed Einstein hair: you're no longer the smartest person in the room (unless you've made a video game,…
pontiff | August 7, 2008Over 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 everyone's rear at.) Here is the schedule on google docs. Because I'm supposed to be working on a talk for an upcoming review, I need something to listen to and watch out of the corner of my eye, as I work on the review. And ScienceOpener provides: A lifefeed of the event.
Which is cool, because now I…
pontiff | August 7, 2008Summer 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 International Summer School in Physics
which will take place in Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbor, from 17-22 November 2008 in memory of Professor Asher Peres
The 2008 school is entitled: From Qubits to Black Holes
and is organised jointly between Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), and the Technion…