Schrödinger's killer app : race to build the world's first quantum computer

by Jonathan P. Dowling

Paper Book, 2013

Status

Available

Call number

004.1

Library's review

Indeholder "Preface", "1. The Early Years -- When Einstein Attacks!", " Certain Uncertainties", " All I'm Ever Going to be Is Incomplete", " Fairies, Gremlins, and Magic Dice", " The Inverted Earth Society", " The Cat in the App", "2. For Whom the Bell Tolls", " Clanking Contraptions and
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Cantankerous Codgers", " Freedom of Choice, French Finesse, and Loopholes", " I Never Metaphysics I Didn't Like", "3. The Quantum Codebreaker", " The Trouble with Thulium", " Turing Machines and a Deutsch Treat", " Your Pad or Mine?", " The People's Key", " The Bolt from the Blue", "4. You're in the Army Now", " The Great Quantum Diaspora", " The Notebook, the Spy, and the Workshop", " The Unlying Lands", " Interior Panel Siding", " Needle in a Haystack", " Quantum Computing in a Coffee Cup -- When the Buzz Wears Off", " D-Wave, BOSS, D-Wave", "5. More Gadgets from the Quantum Spookhouse", " Blessed Are the Codemakers", " Quantum Repeaters and Earth-to-Space Quantum Cryptography", " Beam Me Up, Charlie", " The Tale of the True Timepiece", " From Quantum Computers to Quantum Sensors", " Light Blips Shrink Chips", " The Great Clock Synchronization Saga", "6. Hilbert Space -- The Final Frontier", " Quantum Technology in a FLASH", " Qubits, Four Bits, Six Bits, a Dollar", " The Church of the Larger Hilbert Space", " To Go Where No Mad Scientist Has Gone Before", "Index".

Glimrende beskrivelse af hvordan Einstein ikke kunne forlige sig med det modsatte af locality, reality og certainty. Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen forsøgte med et hidden-variable angreb, men i stedet kunne Alain Aspect vise med et forsøg at Bell's ulighed afgjorde sagen til fordel for kvanteteoriens mærkelige konsekvenser. John Clauser og flere andre havde allerede gjort forsøg, der tydede stærkt på det samme. Feynman pegede på at man kunne simulere kvantesystemer med en kvantecomputer og at der måske ventede eksponentielle hastighedsforøgelser. I 1994 kom Peter Shor med en metode til at bruge en kvantecomputer til at lave en invers Fourier Transformation og finde perioder med, som kan bruges til at finde primfaktorer i tal. Andre algoritmer som David Deutch's orakel og Lov Grover's søgealgoritme dukker op. Man kan ikke klone en Qubit, men man kan godt teleportere den. Det spændende er om man kan lave nok entanglede Qubits i lang nok tid til at løse spændende størrelse problemer. D-Wave laver noget, der ikke er en generel kvantecomputer, men måske alligevel gør noget nyttigt. Til gengæld døde NMR som en nyttig beregningsmåde igen. Man skal bruge tre kvantegates for at lave en universel kvantecomputer, ENT, RAT og CAT. Carlton Caves foreslår at bruge entanglede partikler til at forbedre målenøjagtighed. LIGO og den slags. Quantum lithography.
Sjovt nok er forfatterens killer-app ikke Shor's algoritme men Richard Feynman's universelle quantum simulator. William Phillips har en joke med at sige at chancen for at lave en kvantecomputer er fifty-fifty, med hvilket han mener at der er en halvtreds procents chance for at få bygget den indenfor de næste halvtreds år. DiVincenzo har stillet fem kriterier op. 1. skalerbart fysisk system med veldefinerede qubits. 2. skal kunne initialiseres nemt til veldefineret grundtilstand. 3. qubits skal have meget længere dekoherens tider end gate-speed tider. 4. have et universelt sæt af kvantegates. 5. tillade qubit-specifik aflæsning af en bestemt qubit. De er senere blevet revideret lidt.
1. The physical system has well-characterized qubits and is scalable.
2. The physical system must be able to have the state of the qubits initialized to a known low-entropy state, such as |000... )
3. The decoherence times of the physical system implementing the qubit must be much longer than the quantum gate operation time.
4. A physical system as the embodiment of a quantum computer must have available a "universal" set of quantum logic gates.
5. The physical system must have a qubit-specific measurement capability.
6. The system must have the ability to interconvert stationary and flying qubits.
7. The flying qubits must be transmitted between specified locations without affecting their state.

Umiddelbart er mit indtryk at teknikkerne bag kaster stribevis af nyttige resultater af sig, men jeg er stadig i tvivl om man vil kunne bygge en kvantecomputer med et nyttigt antal qubits set fra en datalogs synsvinkel. På den anden side er det vildt skægt at se at algoritmerne stille hober sig op i håb om at kvantecomputeren dukker op i horisonten.

Bogen har en masse gode observationer om forskningsfinanciering og kortsigtede kontra langsigtede hensyn. Klart at anbefale.

Der er en glimrende video af Peter Shor der selv fortæller. Til at begynde med så det ud til at man ikke kunne lave fejlkorrektion på en kvantecomputer (no-cloning theorem). Det var Landauer, der havde set det. Men man kan kode som |0) som |000) og mere smarte varianter end det. Shor fandt på en 9-qubit kode som korrigerer alle 1-bit fejl. Peter Shor's 9-qubit-code, a.k.a. the Shor code, encoder 1 logisk qubit i 9 fysiske qubits og kan rette vilkårlige 1-qubit fejl.
Video - 24:30
Andrew Steane fandt en 7-qubit kode, der kunne generaliseres, så nu har vi CSS-koder opkaldt efter A. R. Calderbank, Peter Shor og Andrew Steane.
Og symmetrigruppen for koden blev fundet via et programmeringssprog Magma.
Video - 29:30 og den har størrelsen 5160960 og Neil Sloane havde kig på samme gruppe i forbindelse med optimale pakninger i Grassman rum, så det har noget at gøre med quantum error correcting codes.
Der er også noget om Feynman og negative sandsynligheder. Video - 1:00.

Tilstandene beskrives med bra-ket notation. Og da større-end og mindre-end er besværlige i html, skriver jeg (00| og |00) her i stedet for at bruge de "rigtige" paranteser.
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Publication

Boca Raton : CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.

Description

The race is on to construct the first quantum code breaker, as the winner will hold the key to the entire Internet. From international, multibillion-dollar financial transactions to top-secret government communications, all would be vulnerable to the secret-code-breaking ability of the quantum computer. Written by a renowned quantum physicist closely involved in the U.S. government s development of quantum information science, Schrodinger s Killer App: Race to Build the World s First Quantum Computer presents an inside look at the government s quest to build a quantum computer capable of solving complex mathematical problems and hacking the public-key encryption codes used to secure the Internet. The "killer application" refers to Shor s quantum factoring algorithm, which would unveil the encrypted communications of the entire Internet if a quantum computer could be built to run the algorithm. Schrodinger s notion of quantum entanglement and his infamous cat is at the heart of it all. The book develops the concept of entanglement in the historical context of Einstein s 30-year battle with the physics community over the true meaning of quantum theory. It discusses the remedy to the threat posed by the quantum code breaker: quantum cryptography, which is unbreakable even by the quantum computer. The author also covers applications to other important areas, such as quantum physics simulators, synchronized clocks, quantum search engines, quantum sensors, and imaging devices. In addition, he takes readers on a philosophical journey that considers the future ramifications of quantum technologies. Interspersed with amusing and personal anecdotes, this book presents quantum computing and the closely connected foundations of quantum mechanics in an engaging manner accessible to non-specialists. Requiring no formal training in physics or advanced mathematics, it explains difficult topics, including quantum entanglement, Schrodinger s cat, Bell s inequality, and quantum computational complexity, using simple analogies."… (more)

Language

Original language

English

Physical description

xi, 441 p.; 23.4 cm

ISBN

9781439896730

Local notes

Omslag: Ikke angivet
Omslaget viser en spøgelsesagtig kat, der prikker til et spøgelsesagtigt garnnøgle, der ser lidt entangled ud
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/jonathan-dowling
Joke om Den kinesiske restklassesætning
Side xi: I don't know half of you as well as I should like; and I like half less than half of you half as well as you deserve. (Det er en forvrøvlet udgave af Tolkiens original: I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.)
Side 4: In quantum mechanics, things can be in two places at the same time, and most of us quantum physicists have just come to accept this. Einstein never did.
Side 5: The quantum mechanical car, // Is really the most bizarre. // For as soon as you're knowing, // How fast you are going, // You can't know where you are!
Side 12 + 43 - noget om et uheld med et lille glas plutonium pulver.
Side 42: Paul Dirac (P. A. M. Dirac) bliver sur på forfatteren under et foredrag.
Side 79: Tom Leherer (Mon ikke han mener Tom Lehrer)
Side 119: Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, Nitin Saxen - algoritme til at checke primtal med på polynomiel tid. AKS primality test. Den er bare i praksis meget langsommere end flere andre algoritmer.
Side 121: When it comes to the remainder theorem the Chinese are years ahead of us.
Side 203: Not a quick and painless death, as in a massive stroke -- but more like a slow and agonizing death by mad cow disease.
Side 203: The most important tool of a theoretical physicist is the wastebasket. -- Albert Einstein
Side 428: Colossus - roman af Dennis Jones

Pages

xi; 441

Library's rating

Rating

(1 rating; 5)

DDC/MDS

004.1
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