[FRIAM] Quantum Computing

[Steven A Smith]

FWIW, my nephew is in the middle of his PhD in Materials Science in the
UofA working on their Phononic Quantum Computing program.    I can't
suss out how fast it is moving... he only sees the project through the
tiny sliver of his own contribution, but it *seems* to promise much
larger PhiBit (Phononic QBit) counts at room temperature, etc.   Some of
the underlying engineering is quite fascinating (e.g. modulating the
speed of sound in glass rods using coherent light to simulate an
exponential "horn").

https://mse.engineering.arizona.edu/news-events/mse-researcher-uses-phononics-build-quantum-computers

I've been trying to wrap my head around the implications of AQC for the
kinds of problems I've been using 3D graph layout to try to develop
intuition on.   The goal is *rarely* to truly minimize the energy of the
system (modeled as a graph with *vectors* of edge-weights rather than
simple scalars) to explore the trade-space of the systems being
modeled.   In the problem-domain of interest, the challenge is not to
find "the answer" but rather to explore the implied landscape of
high-dimensional problems.

- Steve

On 1/27/19 9:00 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> Jochen writes:
>
>  
>
> “How do you program a AQC quantum computer? Somehow it must be setup
> to execute a certain type of calculation?”
>
>  
>
> An AQC program can be thought of as a graph where the nodes have a
> value that represents a linear bias up or down for qubit spins in the
> problem.   Values on edges in the graph represent the tendency of the
> spins to attract or repel one another.   (The graph is sent to the
> annealer as a matrix.)   The output is a vector of spins that have a
> Boltzmann-like distribution given the relative magnitude of the
> coefficients in the graph to the finite temperature of the machine.  
>  You can find examples on the web of factoring / inverting
> calculations, social network algorithms, vehicle routing, and a range
> of other applications.    There are theory papers (Aharonov 2004) that
> demonstrate that AQC is equivalent to the gate model.  
>
>  
>
> “ And what do you think about photonic quantum computers? The Canadian
> company Xanadu from Toronto tries to go in this direction. 
>
> https://www.xanadu.ai/  “
>
>  
>
> Another well-known one is IonQ.   One of their founders gave a public
> lecture in Santa Fe a few months ago.  These are intriguing systems,
> but they aren’t big enough yet to do meaningful calculations.
>  Honeywell is getting into that area too.  And there are some smaller
> start-ups like Atom Computer.
>
>  
>
> Marcus
>
>  
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20190127/29323ea4/attachment.html>