Lifeboat Foundation

Want to know the answer to a problem before you even try to solve it? New Scientist has the computer for you.

I am, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, quoted pretty extensively in the cover story of this week’s New Scientist magazine (alas, only available to subscribers or those willing to shell out $4.95). The story, by Michael Brooks, is about an interesting recent paper by Lucien Hardy of Perimeter Institute, on the power of “quantum gravity computers.” Lucien’s paper considers the following question: by exploiting quantum fluctuations in the causal structure of spacetime, can one efficiently solve problems that are not efficiently solvable with a garden-variety quantum computer?

As I told Brooks, I really do think this is a hell of a question, one that’s intimately related to the challenge of understanding quantum gravity itself. The trouble is that, until an actual quantum theory of gravity chooses to make itself known to us, almost everything we can say about the question is pure speculation.

But of course, pure speculation is what New Scientist gobbles up with french fries and coleslaw. And so, knowing what kind of story they were going to run, I did my best to advocate giving reality at least a few column inches. Fortunately, the end result isn’t quite as bad as I’d feared.

Demonstrating a long-coherence dual-rail erasure qubit using tunable transmons.

AWS today reported demonstrating an improved approach to quantum error correction that accounts for flip and phase errors in qubits with less overhead (redundant qubits) and on time scales that allow for effective error correction. The work, published today in APS Physical Review X, uses what’s called dual-rail erasure qubits.

Broadly, qubits undergo three types, report AWS researchers Harry Levine and Arbel Haim, in a blog (A new building block for error-corrected quantum computers) today, “[The] vast majority of errors (96%) in our dual-rail qubit are erasure errors (leakage to |00 ⟩), with only a small fraction (4%) of residual (silent) bit-flip and phase-flip errors. This is a strong indicator that if we can accurately flag the erasures, then we can efficiently correct most errors that occur in this system.”

Continue reading “AWS Reports Improved Quantum Error Correction based on Dual-rail Erasure Qubit” »

Our H+ friend Rob Wilkes alerted me to this today!

March 20 (Reuters) — Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink livestreamed on Wednesday its first patient implanted with a chip using his mind to play online chess.

Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts.

Continue reading “Musk’s Neuralink shows first brain-chip patient playing online chess” »

Neuralink, Elon Musk ’s brain chip startup, released a video on Wednesday showing the company’s first patient using a laptop with just his mind.

The video, which was livestreamed on Neuralink’s account on X, showed 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh playing a game of chess on his laptop using Neuralink’s brain computer interface (BCI) technology. Arbaugh is paralyzed from the shoulders down due to what he describes as a “freak diving accident.”

“It’s all brain power there,” Arbaugh said, referring to his ability to use a mouse and keyboard unassisted. He later added, “Basically, it was like using the Force on the cursor and I could get it to move wherever I wanted.”

Funding needed to drive innovation and make therapies available to all, says co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna.

Significant advancements have been made in quantum computing, with major international companies like Google and IBM now providing quantum computing services via the cloud. Nevertheless, quantum computers are not yet capable of addressing issues that arise when conventional computers hit their performance ceilings. This limitation is primarily the availability of qubits or quantum bits, i.e., the basic units of quantum information, is still insufficient.

One of the reasons for this is that bare qubits are not of immediate use for running a quantum algorithm. While the binary bits of customary computers store information in the form of fixed values of either 0 or 1, qubits can represent 0 and 1 at one and the same time, bringing probability as to their value into play. This is known as quantum superposition.

This makes them very susceptible to external influences, which means that the information they store can readily be lost. In order to ensure that quantum computers supply reliable results, it is necessary to generate a genuine entanglement to join together several physical qubits to form a logical qubit. Should one of these physical qubits fail, the other qubits will retain the information. However, one of the main difficulties preventing the development of functional quantum computers is the large number of physical qubits required.

Can a computer therefore replicate the way a discretionary trader reads the Financial Times, to harvest alpha from the FT?

This research demonstrates how equity traders can use machine-readable FT news articles to create systematic trading strategies for large-cap US stocks.

Quantum computers promise to tackle some of the most challenging problems facing humanity today. While much attention has been directed towards the computation of quantum information, the transduction of information within quantum networks is equally crucial in materializing the potential of this new technology.