Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers in Delft have succeeded in teleporting quantum information across a rudimentary network. This first of its kind is an important step towards a future quantum internet. This breakthrough was made possible by a greatly improved quantum memory and enhanced quality of the quantum links between the three nodes of the network. The researchers, working at QuTech—a collaboration between Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO)—are publishing their findings today in the scientific journal Nature.

The power of a future quantum internet is based on the ability to send quantum information (quantum bits) between the nodes of the network. This will enable all kinds of applications such as securely sharing confidential information, linking several quantum computers together to increase their computing capability, and the use of highly precise, linked quantum sensors.

In addition to being a simple power source built from readily available parts and materials, the system runs day and night (in contrast with solar power). The algae, the team thinks, overproduces food during the day, so it continues to happily munch away, and produce electricity, through the night. Although the paper addresses their findings from just that first six-month period, their algae-powered-computer has now been running continuously for a year (and counting).

It’s a pretty nifty trick, but some scaling is probably in order. The system produces a tiny amount of current. The chip, an Arm Cortex M0+ commonly used in Internet of Things applications, sips just 0.3 microwatts an hour to perform very basic calculations. As The Verge notes, if your average laptop uses around 100 watts an hour, you’d need millions of these algae energy harvesters just to check your email or zone out in a Zoom meeting.

But the researchers aren’t targeting laptops. Rather, they believe future iterations would find a niche application powering the billions or trillions of simple sensors and chips making up the Internet of Things. These might take measurements of local conditions in remote locations, for example, or they might be able to charge a small device.

The study was led by Ren Yuanzhen, a researcher with the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, under the PLA’s Strategic Support Force. Coauthors included several senior scientists in China’s defense industry.

Ren and his colleagues could not immediately be reached for comment and it is uncertain to what extent their view represents an official stance of the Chinese military or government.

“A combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation’s operating system,” said the paper, published in the domestic, peer-reviewed journal Modern Defense Technology.

A theorized scheme uses lasers to produce space-time quasicrystals in a plasma—density fluctuations that could be used as diffraction gratings for high-intensity laser pulses.

In modern computers, errors during processing and storage of information have become a rarity due to high-quality fabrication. However, for critical applications, where even single errors can have serious effects, error correction mechanisms based on redundancy of the processed data are still used.

In modern computers, errors during processing and storage of information have become a rarity due to high-quality fabrication. However, for critical applications, where even single errors can have serious effects, error correction mechanisms based on redundancy of the processed data are still used.

Quantum computers are inherently much more susceptible to disturbances and will thus probably always require error correction mechanisms, because otherwise errors will propagate uncontrolled in the system and information will be lost. Because the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics forbid copying quantum information, redundancy can be achieved by distributing logical quantum information into an entangled state of several physical systems, for example multiple individual atoms.

The team led by Thomas Monz of the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and Markus Müller of RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany has now succeeded for the first time in realizing a set of computational operations on two logical quantum bits that can be used to implement any possible operation. “For a real-world quantum computer, we need a universal set of gates with which we can program all algorithms,” explains Lukas Postler, an experimental physicist from Innsbruck.

Scientists realize quantum teleportation between remote, non-neighboring nodes in a quantum network. The network employs three optically connected nodes based on solid-state spin qubits. The teleporter is prepared by establishing remote entanglement on the two links, followed by entanglement swapping on the middle node and storage in a memory qubit.

They demonstrate that once successful preparation of the teleporter is heralded, arbitrary qubit states can be teleported with fidelity above the classical bound, even with unit efficiency. These results are enabled by key innovations in the qubit readout procedure, active memory qubit protection during entanglement generation and tailored heralding that reduces remote entanglement infidelities.

Continue reading “Dutch researchers teleport quantum information across rudimentary quantum network” »

Marcus said the Turing test is not a reliable measure of intelligence because humans are susceptible, and machines can be evasive. Philosopher John Searle introduced the Chinese Room Argument that asserts programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand the language but could not produce real understanding. Even if a computer can interpret symbols and provide sensical responses, it can’t be said to be truly “conscious” because it doesn’t really understand what the symbols mean.

Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, proposed the Winograd schema challenge in 2011. Ernest Davis, Leora Morgenstern, Charles Ortiz, and Gary Marcus developed the schema further. Hector designed it as an improvement of the Turing test. The test is structured with multiple-choice questions called Winograd schemas.

Winograd schemas were named after Terry Winograd, professor of computer science at Stanford University. It is a pair of sentences whose intended meaning can be flipped by changing just one word. They generally involve unclear pronouns or possessives.

Circa 2010 😀 😍

Molecules that arrange themselves into predictable patterns on silicon chips could lead to microprocessors with much smaller circuit elements.