David Detsch on TED Talks

David Deutsch is considered by many people, myself included, to be one of the founders of quantum computing. This is something he introduced in the mid 1980's by showing something that could be done with a quantum computer that couldn't be done with a classical (modern) computer [1]. This is known as Deutsch algorithm, although it wasn't very useful. Consequently quantum computing was something of an oddity until Peter Shor introduced his factoring algorithm in the mid 1990's [2].



While this TED Talk is several years old, I still find it an interesting talk from one of the father's of quantum computing: http://blog.ted.com/2006/09/david_deutsch_o.php. In this talk he brings up two points that I find pretty interesting and worthy of some more discussion:

1. What can be done is really only limited by the laws of physics. If the laws of physics don't prevent it then it is really only our lack of knowledge on how to do it.
2. He advocates that we need to be able to fix problems, not just prevent them. He applies this to the medical field: if you get punched in the nose you want your nose fixed, not how not to get punched in the nose. He also applies this to global warming, which I thought was pretty insightful.

While a great scientist, Deutsch's views on other things are insightful and thought provoking. If you have the 19 minutes to spare, I recommend you check out is talk in the link above. If you have even more time I recommend you check out his book, The Fabric of Reality [3].

References
[1] D. Deutsch, "Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, vol. A, pp. 97-117, 1985.
[2] P. W. Shor, "Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer," SIAM Journal on Computing, vol. 26, p. 25, October 1997 1997.
[3] D. Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, 1 ed. London: Penguin Books, 1997.