pontiff | November 29, 2007One of the funniest abstracts to a paper on the arxiv in many moons appeared yesterday, authored by Carlos Mochon:
arXiv:0711.4114
Title: Quantum weak coin flipping with arbitrarily small bias
Authors: Carlos Mochon
"God does not play dice. He flips coins instead." And though for some reason He has denied us quantum bit commitment. And though for some reason he has even denied us strong coin flipping. He has, in His infinite mercy, granted us quantum weak coin flipping so that we too may flip coins. Instructions for the flipping of coins are contained herein. But be warned! Only those who…
pontiff | November 29, 2007One good reason to subscribe to the New York Times is that they have what I consider far above average science reporting for a newspaper. Their Tuesday Science Times section is a must read for me pretty much every week. Over the last three weeks I've been keeping track of the stories that were run in Tuesday's science section. By my count, three weeks ago there were two stories which might be considered as articles about physics, one of which the categorization is a stretch (swarm models have been studied by physicists, but I doubt many physicists would consider this physics), and since…
pontiff | November 27, 2007My grandfather liked to write letters to the editor. I think I inherited this disease from him. Here are the contents of a recent letter I wrote to the editor of Physics Today which I hope some of you may find amusing.
I greatly enjoyed reading N. David Mermin's last two Reference Frame columns on factoring and quantum computing ("What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring?", Physics Today, April 2007, page 8 and "Some curious facts about quantum factoring", Physics Today, October 2007, page 10.) However as the proud one-time owner of the California license plate "QUBIT" (which I had…
pontiff | November 24, 2007Paul Davies essay in the New York Times on "Taking Science on Faith" is sure to raise some hackles from the science community. Me, I'd just like to point out how silly some of Davies arguments specifics are. Yes, its another edition of "Nitpickers Paradiso."
Davies begins with a mantra yelled by theists ever since science began getting things right and removing the need for supernatural explanation (here done valley girl style): "But, like, what you're doing must be taken, like, on faith because, like, why do you have, like, faith in science? Wah! Wah!" But lets skip ahead and not deal…
pontiff | November 24, 2007Well it is certainly true that Mystics and quantum physicists speak the same language, that language most probably being Mandarin, English, or Hindi, but I'm guessing that's probably not what they meant by that title. I should have stopped reading at the title, but instead I actually scanned down the page.
Oy, this one starts out bad:Quantum physicists have discovered to their amazement that, in the sub-atomic world, particles behave in very "unscientific and unpredictable" ways.
Well actually what physicists have discovered is that particles behave in a totally scientific manner. Their ain…
pontiff | November 21, 2007Books recently removed from the queue. "Mathematicians in Love" by Rudy Rucker, "An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets" by Donald Mackenzie, "Financial Calculus : An Introduction to Derivative Pricing" by Martin Baxter and Andrew Rennie. "109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos" by Jennet Conant.
Mathematicians in Love by Rudy RuckerBest described as a cross between a Philip K. Dick novel, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, and A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram, but not nearly as good as the first two. The story of a surfer mathematician…
pontiff | November 21, 2007Postdocs, APS GQI quantum newsletter, Quantum computing in Waikiki, quantum chicanery, quantum foods.
Postdocs at NIST: National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associateships at Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division of the NIST Information Technology Laboratory
The fall newsletter for the APS Topical Group of Quantum Information, Concepts and Computation is available. Included is a report on a recent quantum computing conference in Iran, as well as statements from the people crazy enough to run the topical group officer positions. Wait, I'm one of those crazies? Doh.
For…
pontiff | November 20, 2007So you want to learn quantum theory in ten minutes? Well I certainly can't give you the full theory in all its wonder and all its gory detail in that time, but I can give you a light version of the quantum theory in about that time. And won't that impress your friends!
To learn quantum theory you first need to learn classical theory. (Walk slowly little grasshopper.) What classical theory should we talk about: mechanics or general relativity or maybe electromagnetism? None of those! Those are crazy overwhelming and intimidating classical theories. Instead we can take a classical theory…
pontiff | November 19, 2007Commenter Michael J. Biercuk asks about D-wave's machine:What is the fundamental experimental test which would demonstrate the system is not simply undergoing a classical, incoherent process?
Of course there are answers to this question which involve some technically fairly challenging experiments (proving that a quantum computer is quantum computing is something which many experimentalists have struggled over, for far smaller systems than D-wave's system.) But there is a much simpler experiment which I haven't seen answered in any of the press on D-wave, and which, for the life of me, I don…
pontiff | November 19, 2007So did anyone at MIT go to this talk and care to comment:Mohammad Amin (D-Wave)
Adiabatic Quantum Computation with Noisy Qubits
Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is an attractive model of quantum computation as it may naturally possess some degree of fault tolerance. Nonetheless, any practical quantum circuit is noisy and one must answer important questions regarding what level of noise can be tolerated. Gate model quantum computation relies on three important quantum resources: superposition, entanglement, and phase coherence. In this presentation, I will discuss the role of these three…
pontiff | November 19, 2007Here is a picture I call "STOC 2008 deadline":
STOC 2008 will be in Victoria, British Columbia. I was just across the border in Surey, BC, and shot this picture which I call "Crazy Canadian Fireplace Channel":
pontiff | November 16, 2007Will the real quantum pontiff please stand up? From the Taiwan Journal:Lee Yuan-tseh, a Taiwanese-born scholar and the 1986 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, was named Oct. 9 as a new member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Benedict XVI. He is the fourth ethnic Chinese scientist to receive this honor.
pontiff | November 16, 2007Seems it 'tis the season for warnings about the security of cryptosystems. The New York Times has an article on the latest issue here. It seems that Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) has a note out describing how faults in chip hardware could render cryptosystems insecure. It's not at all clear to me how this differs from analysis where the faults are injected into the hardware (such as described here) because the article doesn't contain any real details.
pontiff | November 15, 2007Is there a backdoor in NIST's SP800-90 Dual Ec pseudorandom number generator?
According to a presentation by Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson from Microsoft given at CRYPTO 2007, there is a backdoor in this pseudorandom number generator. While the authors don't know how to use the backdoor, they point out that it is possible that the creators of the algorithm specified in the NIST standard could have access to numbers which would render the pseudorandom number generator insecure.
pontiff | November 15, 2007Uncertain Chad asks "What's your favorite dubious proof technique?" I just don't have one dubious proof technique: I have an entire book of dubious proof techniques! Seriously, I have a book where I write them all down.
But if I had to choose a dubious proof technique that was my favorite, it would have to be "proof by logical exhaustion." Now you might think that this means that I logically list all possibilities to prove something, a technique which is perfectly valid and not very dubious at all. No, no. "Proof by logical exhaustion" is where you put forth a chain of logical reasoning…
pontiff | November 15, 2007Can you be arrested for stealing furniture in a virtual world? The source of this question: Philip K. Dick? Nope, NPR:A teenager faces charges of stealing furniture that doesn't exist. The youth in the Netherlands was on one of those Web sites where you create virtual people to wander around virtual buildings spending what amounts to real money. You pay cash for credits to spend online. The 17-year-old allegedly stole $5,800 worth of imaginary furniture. Real police arrested him. They suspect other teens of receiving the stolen goods.
pontiff | November 15, 2007This 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…
pontiff | November 14, 2007Over at The World's Fair, a challenge:Anyway, this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What's that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your own blog. If all goes well, I'd like to create a page at the Science Creative Quarterly, that collects (and links to) the good ones.
Of course there is already a formula for Best Bacon Butty, so I can't do anything about Bacon Butties, damnit. Well recently I've been thinking about how bad I am at…
pontiff | November 14, 2007In 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…
pontiff | November 14, 2007This morning I received a funny email from a graduate student here at UW, Nicholas Murphy, which made me laugh out loud (reproduced and linkified here with permission from Nicholas):Subject: Times Higher Education Supplement rankings: a study in spin
http://www.topmba.com/fileadmin/pdfs/2007_Top_200_Compact.pdf
For entertainment purposes, the same news story from different university publications:
Harvard:http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=520741
Duke:http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2007/11/13/News/Duke-Stays.13.In.Thes.Rankings-3096978.shtml
Yale:http…