rose.blog

Very cool. If you’re not terrified by the end of this check your pulse.

Here’s a link.

I thought this was quite interesting. It’s the slides from the 1998 Turing lecture, given by Jim Gray talking about what enabling technologies would have the most value for IT. Remarkably prescient given the date of the talk and how fast things change.

Here is a particularly interesting screen grab from p.47:

Gray sees such a system “discussing” the system with the designer…and mentions that this is a type of Turing test–the automated programming system is imitating a programmer.

I wonder how close to this vision a good declarative language would be?

What I’m going to try to do is list a bunch of applications that require the solutions of NP-complete or NP-hard problems. These will be found under the Applications tab in the sidebar.

I’m going to try to restrict the list to applications that have the following properties:

1. Problems people really want to solve are too big for exact solvers
2. People are not happy with the level of approximate solutions they can obtain with the best known heuristics
3. The people in 1. and/or 2. would see significant value in being able to solve bigger problems, faster and would make or save a lot of money if this were possible; I’ll try to include only if customers might be willing to pay in excess of $1B/year for satisfactory solution of their problems

Note I’m not saying these problems ACTUALLY have $1B markets, I’m saying that it might be possible. If anyone out there in blogland has actual market numbers to any of these problems that would be very useful.

Any suggestions for problems like this would be greatly appreciated (existing apps or new ones, doesn’t matter); any info on desired customer solution characteristics (size, accuracy, speed, etc.) would be great also.

I think I have found it. It is here.

A few years ago I read a book called Hush by Tim Lebbon and Gavin Williams. Very memorable, interesting and well written. It made my “keep it and read it again list”, and has survived several pulp purges over the years.

So the other day I was looking for some reading material and saw another Tim Lebbon book (Desolation) and bought it. It’s another really strange and superb story and has the same feel to it as Hush does. Then I found everything else he’s written and read that also.

If you’re into Poe/Lovecraft/Barker/Machen/King, pick up a Lebbon book. It’s good stuff. I think he’s at least on par with Barker (although The Hellbound Heart is of course spectacular and a modern masterpiece), but he’s not nearly as well known.

I have been remiss in my blogging duties, I apologize, been a little busy lately…

OK first things first, I mentioned a while back that we were going to do a technology demo in Q4/2006. We have decided to push back the demo until sometime in Q1/2007. So stay tuned, we’re still going to announce the technology shortly. Once I know the date I’ll post it.

Everything is working beautifully by the way. In the almost 8 years since we started D-Wave I’ve only celebrated once (last week), when the whole system was working beginning to end. Quite a good feeling to see such a complicated thing come together like that.

For those of you who will want to use our machines, we’re converging on a programming environment that is alot more flexible and general than the one we’d originally developed as a proof of concept interface to the hardware. The new programming environment includes a declarative language that captures NP. In this framework, a programmer states what the solutions to their NP problems look like in first order logic, and our software compiles this “declaration” down to the machine language of our solver system. Declarative languages may be familiar to some of you (prolog) but don’t worry ours is easier to use, more flexible and works much better.

The big advantage of using a declarative programming language for our systems is that the actual mode of operation of these machines will be unfamiliar to most coders, and we’re trying to make interacting with them as easy and transparent as possible.

For example let’s say you want to code a biotech application (such as molecular geometric pattern matching) which requires the solution of a maximum clique problem. In order to use our machine to solve the clique part, instead of presenting a set of steps representative of some algorithm (in c or java for example), you just state what it means to be a maximum clique in first order logic. Then our software compiles that statement to the guts of the machine. Whenever you call that piece of code you get back the answer you need.

The idea is that you won’t need to know anything about how our systems work to use them–you just need to be able to state what properties the solution you’re looking for has.

I was reading a post on Dave Bacon’s blog about a recent quant-ph article. The article questions whether or not fault tolerant quantum error correction can be run on gate model quantum computers, and offers some arguments as to why the answer may be no.

I believe that all of these arguments can (and probably will) individually be refuted. However I think most of the folks eager to begin the rebuttal may be missing the point.

People actually trying to build real QCs have to deal with a large number of real-life problems that are ignored in most theoretical QC. While they may understand that theory has value, they don’t like being told “this is the way things are” by people who have never had to fix a solder joint (yes, there are solder joints in real QCs).

I was involved with a particular case of this recently. A lot of the literature on adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) is wrong, for a very basic physical reason–the omission of realistic environments. Adding a simple thermal environment produces theory that matches with experiment. So when I see a “theorem” about AQC usually it doesn’t apply in practice - ie. it doesn’t match experiment - because the underlying model was not correct.

This experience isn’t unique. A large number of people actually building things take theory with a grain of salt, especially theory originating with a community that may not know what should be included (or not) in the underlying analyses. You may poke fun at Dyakonov because he doesn’t like his physics to be written in Lemmas; I think his point is that if you write physical statements as Lemmas you’re probably a few steps removed from the lab and may not appreciate the subtleties in a real condensed matter physics situation.

The gate model (which Dyakonov attacks) is obviously highly unrealistic for several reasons. Whether FT/QEC can ever be made to work may not even be the worst of these. This lack of realism doesn’t have to matter to theorists because to a theorist how difficult it might be to enable is not their problem. I think if QC theorists really wanted QCs to be built, there would be a lot more communication between these communities as to what is realistic and what isn’t, which would have led to the abandonment of the gate model many years ago.

Here is a link to Dawkins’ new foundation. Here is a quote from a presentation on the site:

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. But it must be a positive attack, for science and reason have so much to give. They are not just useful, they enrich our lives in the same kind of way as the arts do. Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that Carl Sagan did so well, and I aspire to continue his tradition.

Somebody asked me who Richard Dawkins was after my last post, uhhh just the most brilliant communicator of science of all time dumbass!!! Anyway my vote for Greatest Book Ever Written is Richard Dawkins‘ The Ancestor’s Tale, which I think should be required reading for all living beings. Go buy it and read it.

Of course you can’t go wrong reading anything else he’s ever written–some of the more well-known books like The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion are also superb.

Gives me hope that we’re not all doomed to an existence defined by Fox News, George W. Bush AKA the King of Jesusland and that retard from Iran (who the not-quite-but-almost-as-retarded Glenn Beck calls President Tom, which is funny on several levels) …

I’ve added another category to the widget bar, linking to some presentations about (mostly) quantum computing related stuff.