As part of the Asian University Go competition is an academic workshop! Yup, this is the very first academic workshop that’s not related to physics. So, what do they talk about in such a conference? Well, here’s some topics

• Social advantages for youth who play Go.
• What sort of common characteristics do Go players have?
• Cognitive and emotional skills required to play Go
• How do go players regard go?

So conclusions? Go players have more self discipline, time management, critical thinking, concentration. It teaches players how to deal with defeat, and to better accept other people’s perspectives. But given the limited battery life, so I’ll skip the details. So yup, all parents should get their kids to play go!

Okay, so its not a secret that I’m a gadget lover, one of the few people who prefer reading from the screen than paper (saves trees!). So, I though I should post a photo of just what my desk looks like at home. 

• 24 inch Monitor, check. Great for viewing two pages of whatever paper I’m reading.
• 15.4 inch Monitor on left, for all those internet messaging and status report.
• 13.3 inch Tablet on left, replaces my paper, used to scribble equations and play Go!
• Crazy tube thing is the middle is sub-woofer… small enough to carry back home!
• Wirelesss Logitech Edge as the main keyboard, love the simplicity and elegance of it, great for typing.
• Logitech Edge Mini on the right… hooked with tablet for basic keyboard commands. 
• Microsoft Blue Track mice in there somewhere… only mice that works on forsted glass, unfortunately =\

Its great… except the wires, don’t look underneath the table!

Every now and then, you here some silly event in the US. This one though, is especially worthy. Bill Nye “The Science Guy”, decided to give a talk to the public, and was booed for suggesting that Moonlight was actually reflections from the sun:

Trouble started when the children’s entertainer brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars,” and pointed out that the lesser light was actually a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out, including woman with three small children who shouted, “We believe in God!” and left.

Read the rest here. Its occasions like this that make me really worry about the state of education. Give parents some basic education… please!

I’ve just been alerted to a nifty cartoon on youtube, titled `To Be’, which tackles the philosphy of teleportation…. If we assume the mind to be classical (and most people do), then it can in principle be cloned with perfect accuracy. A possible method for teleportation would then simply involve a measurement of the currnet conciousness, and replicating it at the destination. This idea was also explored in the movie `The Prestige’, but I really do love the treatment in this cartoon:

There’s are plenty of physics papers that are just mathematical details, but every once in a while, we read a paper that offers a new philosophical view of the universe. To me, such paper’s are the true gem’s, they don’t predict the outcomes specific experiments, but rather alludes to entirely new concepts.

One of the paper’s that I had to pleasure of familiarising myself with recently in Landauer’s early work that discovered the remarkable link between information and physics. In particle, it allows us to explain the Schizard Engine, which seemingly allows extract of energy from a system in thermal equilibrium.

Closer inspection would reveal that the fuel of the enginer is information, and storage of that information costs power… its quite an elegant relation.

• Knowledge is Power: The Schizard Engine

Over a year in the making, the mega paper about continuous variable cluster states has finally been published on the archives. Titled, `Quantum Computing with Continous Variable Clusters‘, the paper is essentially a refinement of the idea I jointly proposed as a first year PhD student that it would be pretty cool to have an formulation of measurement based computation where each node was a quantum harmonic oscillator.

Though the idea seemed fairly second nature at the time (hey, just take qubits and replace them with optical modes!), the level of interest in it has been quite a pleasant surprise. The second follow-up paper aims at polishing the idea, and includes a lot of the details that was sort of brushed away during the initial proposal.

Quantum Computing with Continuous-Variable Clusters
Mile Gu, Christian Weedbrook, Nicolas C. Menicucci, Timothy C. Ralph, Peter van Loock

Continuous-variable cluster states offer a potentially promising method of implementing a quantum computer. This paper extends and further refines theoretical foundations and protocols for experimental implementation. We give a cluster-state implementation of the cubic phase gate through photon detection, which, together with homodyne detection, facilitates universal quantum computation. In addition, we characterize the offline squeezed resources required to generate an arbitrary graph state through passive linear optics. Most significantly, we prove that there are universal states for which the offline squeezing per mode does not increase with the size of the cluster. Simple representations of continuous-variable graph states are introduced to analyze graph state transformations under measurement and the existence of universal continuous-variable resource states.

Arxiv Link

Not the most exciting paper, but it has pretty pictures, including my first ever attenmpt at doing rendering wtih 3D studio max. That’s got to be worth something right? Also, I must thank Christian Weedbrook, who capacity in eliminating all of my typos as I busily hammered away at furniture here in Singapore is so remarkable that I’m convinced he secretly hides a quantum computer in his back yard!

Let us all share a moment of silence for the glorious free tail bat who bravely ventured into the depth of space. Our nameless hero clungly resolutely to the fuel tanks of the spaceshuttle Discovery, as it launched itself into orbit a mere 3 days ago. The fate of the bat so far, remains unknown, though NASA officially speculate that it was either frozen in the void of space or charred during the fiery lunch sequence. Whatever the case, all bats today can hang proud, knowing that one of their own has made the first steps towards space.

Oh, you can also read NASA’s much less inspiring statement on the matter.

So… there I was, the guinea pig of the new `research siminar’ series, where members of the Center for Quantum Technology presented their work in progress to public, in an effort to improve inter-department collaboration. Such political correctness, and so good on paper! Yet, you still want to give a talk with no major loopholes, and that not an easy task for you’re giving a 1 hour presentation on 4 days of work! Yet, somehow, I persevered (though my sleeping patterns did not), and all animations prepared. The notebook plugged in… the presentation ready to execute….

Yet, the $15,000 dollar presentation system laughed, and proceeded to perform the blue screen of death. So, yup, the entire session ended up being a whiteboard presentation. So, here’s the promised digital version, totally free and available online! The basic idea is thus:

Occam’s Razor states that the few assumptions an explanation makes, the more preferable and likely it true. When applied to modelling the output of a string of bits from a black box, one interpretation measures the simplicity of a given by the number of bits that the model must keep track of to execute. The fewer the number of bits, the sharper the razor. Crutchfield then showed that the sharpest of classical razors was the Epsilon machine… our question is, can Quantum mechanics sharpen that razor further? 

• Classical and Quantum Razors (297)

The talk first reviews how classical Occam’s Razor can be formalised through use of Epsilon Machines, and proceeds to outline some of my thoughts on how a Quantum version of Occam’s Razor could be superior. I hope to have a nice article on this stuff in a next few days. In the mean time, feel free to make sense of the presentation! There’s obviously lots of holes to fill, and in fact, Valerio pointed out one during the talk… see if you can find it too, but I promise that its already been addressed!

The Telegraph has reported interesting research that concludes many aspects of human intelligence peak at 22, and significantly decline by the age of 27.

The first age at which performance was significantly lower than the peak scores was 27 – for three tests of reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation. Memory was shown to decline from the average age of 37. In the other tests, poorer results were shown by the age of 42.

Yup, Reasoning, Speed of Though… Visualisation… three of the most important skills for physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists! Looks like the colloquil belief held by Mathematicians that you do your best work before 30 is correct…

This is another one of those signs that something serious needs to be done about the education system. Most 22 year olds studying sciences are still… well studying. With the recent decline in accelerated education programs in many western universities, this doesn’t spell positives for the development of scentific breakthroughs.

And yelp! Looks like I don’t have much time left!

One of my current research projects have lead me to an rather interesting side problem. The basic idea is this:

If you’re given some random data streams from an unknown physical object… can you make a good argument to say that the object works on quantum principles? Obviously, there’s always a classical explanation, given that classical computers can simulate quantum computers, albeit inefficiently. However, could you call upon Occam’s Razor and argue that the simplest explanation is quantum?

To do this, one needs first a good mathematical formulation of Occam’s Razor for classical systems. It turns out that one good candidate are what’s called epsilon machines. So, I thought I’d write a quick research note of these objects:

• Epsilon Machines: Formalizing Occam’s Razor

Now… just need to find a meaningful way of quantizing it!