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!