The Era of the Gay Particle (a.k.a. Majorana Quasi Particle and Anyon) Begins

I first reported in this blog about a possible sighting of a Majorana quasi particle on Oct, 2014. In that blog post, I referred to them as gay particles because they are neither bosons nor fermions but something in between**. (I was making fun of Leon Lederman, who is credited with being the first person to refer to the Higgs boson particle as the God particle)

Check out this recent, excellent (very knowledgeable, clear and well written) article

Majorana Update by Stevan Nadj-Perge

recounting the amazing progress that has been made in the last 5 years on the gay particle front, going from an uncertain sighting of the elusive particle in 2012, to almost certain evidence of its existence just 2 weeks ago.

Most scientists believe that (gate model) quantum computing done using gay particles will have much lower error rates than quantum computing done using transmon superconductive circuits (the latter is the strategy being pursued by IBM, Google and many others).

The bad news is that Microsoft is the only major company in the world that has invested bigly in this technology and they have patented it to the hilt. The good news is that the MS quantum software is really crappy and closed source. Quantum open source will crush them like Linux and Android did before. As to the hardware, I predict that MS will try to use its patents to monopolize this technology in the US and Europe, but China will quickly duplicate the MS hardware, ignore the patents to a large extent, and offer this technology worldwide via the cloud.

**In case you are wondering, I am not gay. And the term “gay particle” is definitely not meant to be a homophobic slur. As I have said before in this blog, I have a lot of respect and admiration for many gay people, including two of mankind’s greatest heroes, Leonardo DaVinci and Alan Turing. And maybe Ettore Majorana too?

Dueling Quantum Computing Conferences, not to be missed by anyone who is anyone

These two “beauty contests” conferences are more exclusive than Davos. John Preskill, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Ivanka Trump are expected to fly in by helicopter. (We, the commoners, will be permitted to observe the proceedings from behind a cyclone fence)

West Coast – Dec 4-6, q2b Conference, http://www.q2b.us

East Coast – Dec 6-8, ThinkQ Conference,
https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/thinkq/

Strange Connection Between ATOS corporation and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Quantum Computing Division

The ATOS corporation, based in Bezons, France, has a really bad reputation in some countries like the UK. To see this, check out, for example, the “Controversy” section of the Wikipedia entry on ATOS.

On October 20, 2017, ORNL put out a press release entitled:
“Two ORNL-led research teams receive $10.5 million to advance quantum computing for scientific applications”

On Nov 13, 2017, ATOS put out the following press release: click here

This is very odd because a quantum simulator of 30 qubits is not considered leading edge nowadays. Google/ProjectQ have simulated 45 qubits and IBM has simulated 56 qubits. Furthermore, ORNL owns the Titan supercomputer, one of the largest supercomputers in the world. ORNL is at the forefront of HPC, so why did they buy an expensive albeit not very powerful French machine to do quantum simulations? Like selling coals to Newcastle, isn’t it? ATOS claims to offer a “Quantum Learning Machine” that runs a quantum language called aQasm, but their language is closed source. I haven’t found any tutorial, or examples, or open source software for it, no matter how hard I’ve looked. Why did ORNL, a DOE weapons lab in the very red #MAGA state of Tennessee, do something so un-MAGA and unpatriotic by MAGA standards, namely, to buy expensive French closed-source software and hardware when American companies like IBM and Google already provide an open-source quantum language and development kit and cloud usage of it for quantum simulations? Is this evidence of government waste, abuse or corruption, and does the government care?

Volkswagen’s Entangled Quantum State

Long, long ago (May 2013), in a galaxy far away (Silicon Valley), Google together with NASA bought a DWave quantum computer.

And then, just 7 months ago (Mar 2017), Volkswagen proudly announced that it was using a Dwaver quantum computer for traffic flow optimization in Beijing.

But yesterday, Volkswagen put out the following press release

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2017/11/volkswagen-group-quantum-computing.html

announcing a grand partnership between Volkswagen and Google’s quantum computer group.

Some excerpts from yesterday’s Volkswagen press release: (Dwave was not mentioned directly.)

Neven: Google already has a high-performance quantum computer and the software it takes to run it.

Hofmann: One key focal point of our partnership will be optimizing traffic with the help of quantum computing. In this work, we will draw on the findings of our first research project with 10,000 taxis in China’s capital, Beijing.

Hmm, has Google swiped their friend’s biggest client?

(art by Frankes )

Artiste-qb.net CEO will be a Featured Speaker at mini-summit to be held on Tuesday by the Toronto AI Meetup

The Toronto AI meetup, which currently has a whopping 1,694 members, will be holding a ‘mini-summit’ on Tuesday (1 day from now).

https://www.meetup.com/Toronto-AI/events/244297451/

The Univ. of Toronto, may I remind you, is the home of Geoffrey Hinton, one of world’s leading researchers in the field of artificial neural networks (he and 3 others invented, in a 1986 paper, the backpropagation method)

Tuesday’s summit will feature 5 speakers, 2 women and 3 men. One of the men will be Henning Dekant, the CEO of artiste-qb.net (the company I work for). Henning will be speaking on quantum computing AI. The venue for the meeting will be the 5th floor of the SAS Institute (Canada) Inc. Henning is scary ugly (he dresses as himself for Halloween). He isn’t as beautiful and brainy as the two women speakers, but he does have the home court advantage, having worked at the SAS Institute for many years before leaving it to lead artiste-qb.net.