D-Wave Python Dev Kit

Looks like D-Wave has a developer kit setup for Python, as outlined in this tutorial on their site: http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dev-tutorial-finance.html. Looks like they realized the same thing I did: to really be applicable for the commercial environment quantum computers need to be programmed via frameworks and not new quantum specific languages.

When I started work on Cove I actually started doing the implementation in both Python and C#. I quickly realized that was creating a lot of unnecessary work for myself and quickly abandoned the Python implementation. My reason for settling on C# was largely that the libraries could be used by multiple languages. However, I still think Python is a great candidate- Python's readability and simple learning curve make it a natural choice.

Quantum chip out of Bristol

They've made some recent progress at Bristol University, making a small quantum chip. Some articles:

• TechEye
• Crazy Engineers
• ZME Science
• And of course, the Bristol press release.
  

Q & A with Seth Lloyd

Here's a short question and answer with Seth Lloyd of MIT in Popular Science. As one would expect, this is more of a primer being in PopSci.

Caltech awarded funding for quantum research

Caltech awarded $12.6 million for new Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.

More progress

More progress, from the National Science Foundation: Tiny crystal towers enlighten understanding of photon emission, could inspire diamond microchips for quantum computing. (Image from the release.)

Maintaining Entanglement for an Hour

Maintaining quantum states for any length of time is one of the big challenges in quantum computing. So this news about maintaining entanglement for an hour is encouraging. (Image from the article.)

Suppressing decoherence

Some progress towards suppressing decoherence, a major stumbling block towards physical implementations of quantum computers.

Dave Bacon Moves to Google

I came across this: Dave Bacon, previously at the University of Washington, has moved on to Google. Is the commercialization of quantum computing on the horizon?

Michael Nielsen on Open Science

Michael Nielsen of [1] fame on open science:



[1] Nielsen, Michael A., and Isaac L. Chuang. Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. 2008. 1 ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 8.

Quantum computing named one of the hottest 10 fields in science

The Financial Times has named quantum computing one of the 10 hottest fields in science in a recent article.

Paper: Verification of Quantum Programs

I'm of the opinion that formal verification of programs has a limited set of applications, in large part due to the "good enough" software principle. Nonetheless, it is nice to see work in the quantum programming area. Here's a just posted paper on arXiv: Verification of Quantum Programs by Ying, Yu, Feng, and Duan.

QIS-XML: An Extensible Markup Language for Quantum Information Science

By Pascal Heus out of George Mason University: QIS-XML: An Extensible Markup Language for Quantum Information Science.

Cooling through computation

Erasing data generates heat. For example, an And gate can erase data because if you get a false (0) you don't know if the inputs were both false or if just one of them were 0. Hence quantum computers need to perform reversible operations. Here is some pretty cool work on cooling computers by the computations they perform.

D-Wave sells quantum computer to Lockheed Martin

For those who have not seen it yet, D-Wave has sold its first quantum computer to Lockheed Martin for 10 million. Here are a few of the many articles about it:

• Discover Magazine
• International Business Times
  

Verdal on the cover of the new Scientific American

Vlatko Verdal, of [1] fame, wrote an article titled "Living in a Quantum World", which made the cover of this month's (June 2011) cover of Scientific American.

References
[1] Vedral, Vlatko. Introduction to Quantum Information Science. 1 ed. Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2006.

More D-Wave Claims

For those who have not seen it yet, D-Wave is making some new claims. I've been skeptical since 2007, and still feel the same way. I think Scott Aaronson described the situation well in his blog, as he usually does about D-Wave.

Information sharing at the quantum limit

Out of the Max Planck Institute yesterday: Information sharing at the quantum limit (A photon transfers its secrets onto a single atom).

UC Santa Barbara to get $7.5 million for quantum computing

UC Santa Barbara is getting $7.5 million for quantum computing research from the Defense Department. The work will be lead by Awschalom.

Quantum Public Key Encryption

One of the most cited benefits of a quantum computer is that it can factor, therefore breaking many current public key encryption systems. That makes this recent paper by Kawachi, Koshiba, Nishimura, and Yamakami certainly interesting: a quantum version of public key encryption. Here's a brief article in MIT Technology Review, and the paper on arXiv. The abstract:

We introduce a computational problem of distinguishing between two specific quantum states as a new cryptographic problem to design a quantum cryptographic scheme that is "secure" against any polynomial-time quantum adversary. Our problem, QSCDff, is to distinguish between two types of random coset states with a hidden permutation over the symmetric group of finite degree. This naturally generalizes the commonly-used distinction problem between two probability distributions in computational cryptography. As our major contribution, we show that QSCDff has three properties of cryptographic interest: (i) QSCDff has a trapdoor; (ii) the average-case hardness of QSCDff coincides with its worst-case hardness; and (iii) QSCDff is computationally at least as hard as the graph automorphism problem in the worst case. These cryptographic properties enable us to construct a quantum public-key cryptosystem, which is likely to withstand any chosen plaintext attack of a polynomial-time quantum adversary. We further discuss a generalization of QSCDff, called QSCDcyc, and introduce a multi-bit encryption scheme that relies on similar cryptographic properties of QSCDcyc.

(Image from the paper.)

Quantum Information in the Mainstream

It looks as if quantum information is starting to enter the mainstream: US News and World Report has an article on using diamonds for quantum memory.