Quantum Computing Bastardizations

Update 4/5/09: The wandering Australian does an analysis by institution. Today, because I have way to many deadlines fast approaching, I needed to waste some time (procrastineerering), I decide to take a look at the last years worth of scited papers on the quant-ph section of scirate.com. The question I wanted to investigate is where quantum computing theory is occurring worldwide. So I took the top scited papers scoring over 10 scitations (42 papers in all) and looked at the affiliations of the authors: each co-author contributed a fractional score to their particular region (authors with…

Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is "Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking." Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don't know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research ("cracking?" and "hacking?" btw.) I open up the article and who is the police woman? It's Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described…

Here is an article at physorg.com about a result in quantum computing (see here for my own article on this result.) And here is an article on the website fudzilla describing this physorg result. How in the world do you get from the physorg article to fudzillas: "Top boffins who have been looking under the bonnet of Quantum computers are starting to think that they may not be the future of computing"? Is the internet version of the game telephone more or less noisy than the spoken game?

A correspondent writes to me about a recent article in the APS News describingThe Top Ten Physics Stories of 2008 and notes a very troubling sentence:Diamond Detectors Work on the molecular structure of carbon continues to show great promise for quantum computing. This year scientists were able to construct a nano-scale light source that emits a single photon at a time. The team first removed a solitary atom from the carbon's otherwise regular matrix and then introduced a nitrogen atom nearby. When they excited this crystal with a laser, single polarized photons were emitted from the empty…

One of the coauthors on the paper which I claimed was shoddy has written a comment in the original post. Which merits more commenting! But why comment in the comment section when you can write a whole blog post replying! The paper in question is 0804.3076, and the commenter is George Viamontes:Dave, this is a complete mis-characterization of the paper. Before I start the rebuttal, I'll add the disclaimer that I am the second author of the paper, and would be more than happy to clarify this work to anyone. Sweet! Continuing:We are absolutely well aware of the threshold theorem and we even…

Okay, well apparently the paper arXiv:0804.3076 which I mentioned in the last post is being picked up by other bloggers (see here and here as well as here) as a legitimate criticism of quantum computing. So before anymore jump on this bad wagon let me explain exactly what is wrong with this paper. THE PAPER DOESN'T USE FAULT TOLERANT CIRCUITS. Hm, did you get that? Yeah a paper which claims thatWe will show, however, that if even a small amount of imprecision is present in every gate, then all qubits in every code block will be affected, and more importantly the error in any given qubit…

Okay, quick, who can be the first to tell me what is drastically wrong with arXiv:0804.3076? (via rdv.) Winner gets a beer next time I see them. This is almost as fun as the game of trying to spot the error in papers claiming thethe discovery of a quantum algorithm for efficiently solving NP-complete problems.

Postdoc in Italy, AQIS 2008 Call for Papers, the Register reports on QUEST, and the New Scientist morphs into the No Scientist. There is a postdoc position available in Italy:A Post Doctoral fellowship in Quantum Information Theory is available at the University of Camerino, Department of Physics, associated with the EU project "Correlated Noise Errors in Quantum Information Processing" (CORNER FP7-ICT-2007). The research work consists in the development of optimal encoding and decoding procedures for quantum memory channels. This should be done in connection with the channels…

Over at Emergent Chaos I found an article which throws down the gauntlet over quantum computers. And there isn't anything I cherish more than gauntlets thrown down! Note: I should preface this by saying that I don't consider myself a over the top hyper of quantum computers in the sense attacked by the author. I find quantum computers fascinating, would really like to see if one can be built, but find the hyperbole that accompanies any small advance in the field a bit over the top. However I also think the article misses a lot of important points (and insinuates that people haven't…

This glib article from the Wired Blog Gadgets Lab discusses some of the "crazy" ideas for building computers. Among them, of course, are quantum computers, which means, of course that a quantum computing bastardization, can't be far from behind. Let's begin at the beginning:Quantum Computers Sudoku. That's all D-Wave's quantum computer is good for right now, and even then they wouldn't let us hacks see it in the flesh. By lining up subatomic particles to encode information in a manner similar to the binary data found in conventional computers, such computers create "quantum bits," subject…

In an article on stopping a large spectrum of light with metamaterials in The Telegraph (research which is very cool, but isn't available online, yet, as far as I can tell), I find some lines that would make the Optimizer go bonkers:By contrast, the switches in a quantum computer can be both "on" and "off" at the same time. A "qubit" could do two calculations at once, two qubits would do four and so on. Thus, it was theoretically possible to use quantum computers to explore vast numbers of potential solutions to a problem simultaneously. Ouch, my brain hurts. Okay, so I'm fine with, if a bit…