With apologies to my non-geeky friends and the usual I-am-not-a-real-physicist caveat... Thought for the day: From a mathematical-universe perspective, a superposition represents a case where we are able to confine a quantum-random variable to a fixed set of possible values without leaking information on which specific value it adopts - such that we could be in one of a constrained set of possible universes (we ultra-generally dont get to know which universe were in except by measurement, which is why/at which point we feel like the superposition collapses/d). Quantum computing, as I understand it, is basically a collection of tricks for further constraining the possibility space in such a way that only a single value is left - computing a useful function by binding it to nature in a way that allows it to sort of inherit truth (such bad poetry, I apologise). Semi-aside: One could argue the set of all such possible natural functions (up to composition) is a fundamental property of our level I multiverse (actually probably even across quite a lot of level II) in a way that e.g. the set of all possible Turing machine operations is not (the latter is of course much more fundamental). Thus I suspect a more accurate description of this articles result is we can now quantum-isolate particles in such a fashion that we can be precisely uncertain of their/our position on 103 parallel axes in Hilbert space. (This is also undoubtedly very bad poetry, but if I guess enough of the teachers passwords they may take an interest in correcting me, which is valuable :-) ) I had totally failed to appreciate the potential value for small-register-size computers (of the sort we can currently manage to isolate as q-systems) of being able to use >2 bits per register index. This seems *huge*.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 03:31:46 +0000