The Qubit Thread...

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TheGreenGoblin
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The Qubit Thread...

#1 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jan 07, 2021 1:46 pm

For those who are interested in matters quantum, of whom there must be many here! ;)))

A really good intro. to quantum computing...

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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#2 Post by ian16th » Thu Jan 07, 2021 2:31 pm

Once upon a time, I would have been interested.

Coming up my 84th birthday, a hour and a half is too big a part of my life!
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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#3 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jan 07, 2021 3:42 pm

ian16th wrote:
Thu Jan 07, 2021 2:31 pm
Once upon a time, I would have been interested.

Coming up my 84th birthday, a hour and a half is too big a part of my life!
Give it a whirl for 10 minutes ian16th, you may find yourself hooked or even quantumly entangled. ;)))
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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#4 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jan 07, 2021 3:58 pm

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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#5 Post by Undried Plum » Thu Jan 07, 2021 4:30 pm

In my middling days as a hydrographic surveyor, the leading provider of hardware and software combo was Qubit.

They provided a great big self-contained module, which was actually an RCV225 controller box, containing Hewlett Packard gear, which was just one centimetre too big to get through the standard door width of a Norwegian ship's bridge. You had to carry the heavyweight bastard up through umpteen twisty stair levels to where it was needed.

In its day, it was a bit high-tech, for the early 1980s. Quite good at doing what was required of it. Actually. It was Hewleltt Packard based, entirely.

Knowing personally, as a shipmate, that the very already wealthy and really clever instigator of Qubit had Australian connections, and having worked with him on the TransMed pipeline job, I always thought that the name came from Queensland Bitter. He always denied that, of course.

Long before those XXXX ads on telly.

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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#6 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jan 07, 2021 5:48 pm

Undried Plum wrote:
Thu Jan 07, 2021 4:30 pm
In my middling days as a hydrographic surveyor, the leading provider of hardware and software combo was Qubit.

They provided a great big self-contained module, which was actually an RCV225 controller box, containing Hewlett Packard gear, which was just one centimetre too big to get through the standard door width of a Norwegian ship's bridge. You had to carry the heavyweight bastard up through umpteen twisty stair levels to where it was needed.

In its day, it was a bit high-tech, for the early 1980s. Quite good at doing what was required of it. Actually. It was Hewleltt Packard based, entirely.

Knowing personally, as a shipmate, that the very already wealthy and really clever instigator of Qubit had Australian connections, and having worked with him on the TransMed pipeline job, I always thought that the name came from Queensland Bitter. He always denied that, of course.

Long before those XXXX ads on telly.
It seems that they were swallowed up by Kelvin Hughes and fell into the hands of some awful bunch of private equity asset strippers and sellers and the remnants hoovered up by Hensoldt.

https://www.hensoldt.net/
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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#7 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jan 07, 2021 6:06 pm

The whole navigation thing resonates with the quantum effects...

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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#8 Post by Undried Plum » Thu Jan 07, 2021 9:03 pm

TheGreenGoblin wrote:
Thu Jan 07, 2021 5:48 pm
It seems that they were swallowed up by Kelvin Hughes and fell into the hands of some awful bunch of private equity asset strippers and sellers and the remnants hoovered up by Hensoldt.
Oh! the irony!

I was first hired by Kelvin Hughes when they were the dog's bollocks in hydrographic surveying.

Then they fell into the hands of some damned cheap clockmaker, ****.

Then I worked for a small subsidiary of an electronics navigation company.

The boss had ben promoted sideways into us 'cos he was the ****q wot turned down The Beatles when he was the head of the Record company of that firm.

Nice guy, but a bit crap at business, as are so many of British company directors

Brilliant company of people though. The best of the best. :-bd

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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#9 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Jan 09, 2021 1:35 pm

Though you remain
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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#10 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Tue Jan 12, 2021 1:45 pm

It is not often one can associate pilots and flying with quantum or even classical computing or physics, but in the case of the Fredkin gate a pilot is or was involved.

The Fredkin gate is a universal logic gate that can be wholly used to construct binary circuits that allow any Boolean arithmetical operation and thus also allows reversible logic operations such as 1 AND 1 which gives a logical output bit set to 1 .

NB - This logical operation is logically reversible because we known that if the output bit was set to 1 and the Boolean operator was an AND, then the first and second operand bits must also have been 1, whereas if the output bit is set to 0 and the Boolean operator was an AND, then we cannot know precisely what the first or second operands were, because they could have been 0 or 1 (because either 1 AND 0, 0 AND 1, gives output 0).

Anyway I digress because my point here is the following interesting historical one ref. Edward Fredkin who was a pilot autodidact who went on to inspire Richard Feynman in his thesis and to question whether a classical computer can be used to emulate a quantum computer or not (a question which I am sure keeps many on this site worried and awake at night). ;)))
Fredkin was an American college dropout who trained as a fighter pilot in the mid-1950s but had to quit flying because of asthma, and so worked for the air force on a project which introduced him to computer programming. After he returned to civilian life, he became a computer consultant, then founded his own company and became rich, all the while developing the idea, which most people dismissed as crazy at the time, that the Universe might be a gigantic digital computer. One of the reasons why people dismissed the idea as crazy was, of course, that the laws of physics are reversible, and in the 1950s and 1960s it was thought that computers had to be irreversible. But Fredkin was stubborn. He decided that if that was the flaw in the argument, he had to find a way to show that it was possible to make reversible computers. Fredkin had contacts at MIT through his computer company, and managed to wangle an appointment there, in 1966, as a visiting professor. He was so successful that the next year he became a full professor, at the age of thirty-four (still without having finished college!), and then Director of the Laboratory for Computer Science. It was in this capacity that he met Richard Feynman, and arranged to spend 1974 at Caltech so that Feynman could teach him quantum physics and he could teach Feynman about computers. It was while he was at Caltech that Fredkin found the way to make a reversible computer.
from Gribbin, John. Computing with Quantum Cats
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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#11 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Tue Jan 12, 2021 3:13 pm

Not specifically quantum but Fredkin's philosophy is interesting.

Fredkin's philosophy of the universe...

David Kipping has much of interest to say about this...

https://boingboing.net/2020/10/13/new-r ... d-out.html

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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#12 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Tue Jan 12, 2021 4:07 pm

Houman Owadi makes a direct link between some of these ideas and the quantum world...
Houman Owhadi, an expert on computational mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, has thought about the question. “If the simulation has infinite computing power, there is no way you’re going to see that you’re living in a virtual reality, because it could compute whatever you want to the degree of realism you want,” he says. “If this thing can be detected, you have to start from the principle that [it has] limited computational resources.” Think again of video games, many of which rely on clever programming to minimize the computation required to construct a virtual world.

For Owhadi, the most promising way to look for potential paradoxes created by such computing shortcuts is through quantum physics experiments. Quantum systems can exist in a superposition of states, and this superposition is described by a mathematical abstraction called the wave function. In standard quantum mechanics, the act of observation causes this wave function to randomly collapse to one of many possible states. Physicists are divided over whether the process of collapse is something real or just reflects a change in our knowledge about the system. “If it is just a pure simulation, there is no collapse,” Owhadi says. “Everything is decided when you look at it. The rest is just simulation, like when you’re playing these video games.”

To this end, Owhadi and his colleagues have worked on five conceptual variations of the double-slit experiment, each designed to trip up a simulation. But he acknowledges that it is impossible to know, at this stage, if such experiments could work. “Those five experiments are just conjectures,” Owhadi says.
Do we live in a simulation?
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Your destination remains
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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#13 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jan 14, 2021 6:13 pm

A really good article on this area of science by Tushna Commisariat...

https://physicsworld.com/a/a-universal- ... -and-mind/

although hard nosed Aussies like Matt O' Dowd might pooh-pooh such stuff...


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Re: The Qubit Thread...

#14 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sun May 23, 2021 2:36 am

Though you remain
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"To be alive
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Your destination remains
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