Thursday, February 23, 2006

Recent Progress using Quantum Interrogation

This continues the historical thread of Quantum Cuteness and Quantum Stalking.

Anyway, I just saw on Gazebo's blog a link to an article that discusses a recent paper in Nature paper concerning how to experimentally combine quantum computing and quantum interrogation to find the result of a quantum algorithm without actually running it.

As I just commented on Gazebo's blog, there is an obvious Spaceballs parallel here---the whole thing reminds me of watching a home video of a movie that hasn't even finished yet. It's all just very meta.

Apparently, the new results can potentially be used to reduce errors in quantum computation, which is a very important application of this (currently) "gedanken technology", as David Mermin likes to call it.

Anyway, these experiments are quite exciting, and I expect it will stimulate a lot of cool subsequent work.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stumbled across your blog. Not that I have any interest in quantum physics. Just wanted to let you my last two jobs were, Mason and Porter.
-cheers
btw, your middle name wouldn't happen to be Dancer would it? Cuz that's my new job.

Mason said...

Nope, that's not my middle name. It's Alexander, which doesn't correspond to any job of which I'm aware.

I do like to joke, though, that my parents were trying to tell me something about my future with their naming choice.

Lemming said...

You mean, like, with a carefully chosen anagram?

Mason said...

That's not what I was thinking, but that's a good point.

Maybe they felt the valley was getting too much action and they wanted some of it for Beverly Hills?