Swashbuckling tales of greed, deception, and quantum data (not to mention wenches)

This is another entry that I have been meaning to write for a while.

First, I saw Fair Maid of the West: Parts I & II at the Furious Theatre on the balcony of the Pasadena Playhouse the day before I left for bloody England. I was going to see it the day before but (alas) my zombification delayed things for a day.

Anyway, this play was a liberal adaptation of two plays (written 30 years apart) written by Thomas Heywood circa 1600 and 1630. The main changes in the play was the addition of lots of extra pirates and sword fights. These fights were ok, but they weren't spectacular and, in general, I consider the play to be decent but not great. There were some amusing moments and these small, quaint venues can be pretty cool for watching plays. (A couple of the ones I saw in Atlanta were at such venues, and there can be a certain charm about them.) One of the major supporting actors wasn't present and his understudy did a lousy job with an overdone, horribly fake Scottish accent (which was the wrong accent anyway!). The others had reasonable (yet fake, of course) English or generic European accents that worked much better in this setting than the understudy's Groundskeeper Willy. (Pretty soon, I began cringing whenever this guy had lines.)


Now for the quantum data part...

One of my collaborators at Georgia Tech apparently saw some reference to pirates in something I wrote (maybe my blog) and sent me notice of the following (apparently real) seminar:


Speaker: Jonathan Walgate

Title: Quantum Buried Treasure. A swashbuckling tale of greed, deception,
and quantum data hiding on the high seas.

Date+Time: 4.00pm, Wednesday 14th December 2005

Place: 4th Floor Seminar Room of Perimeter Institute

Abstract: When we hide or encrypt information, it's probably because that
information is valuable. I present a novel approach to quantum data hiding
based this assumption. An entangled treasure map marks the spot where a
hoard of doubloons is buried, but the sailors sharing this map want all
the treasure for themselves! How should they study their map using LOCC?
This simple scenario yields a surprisingly rich and counterintuitive game
theoretic structure. A maximally entangled map performs no better than a
separable one, leaving the treasure completely exposed. But non-maximally
entangled maps can hide the information almost perfectly. Warning:
contains pirates.


Before finishing this entry, by the way, I consider it necessary to point out that the Perimeter Institute is in Waterloo (Canada, but still...).