Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists from MIPT and the Russian Quantum Center, joined by colleagues from Saratov State University and Michigan Technological University, have demonstrated new methods for controlling spin waves in nanostructured bismuth iron garnet films via short laser pulses. Presented in Nano Letters, the solution has potential for applications in energy-efficient information transfer and spin-based quantum computing.

A particle’s spin is its intrinsic angular momentum, which always has a direction. In magnetized materials, the spins all point in one direction. A local disruption of this magnetic order is accompanied by the propagation of spin waves, whose quanta are known as magnons.

Unlike the electrical current, spin wave propagation does not involve a transfer of matter. As a result, using magnons rather than electrons to transmit information leads to much smaller thermal losses. Data can be encoded in the phase or amplitude of a spin wave and processed via wave interference or nonlinear effects.

Surfers have a concept they call progression. It is roughly the idea that each successive generation of wave riders is not constrained by the same idea of what is “impossible.” Progression often comes in small steps, usually helped by improvements in technology but every so often—like Laird Hamilton’s Millennium Wave at Teahupoo, Tahiti (1)—it comes in a giant leap when somebody does what everyone else was too scared to try. On page 1366 of this issue, Mitra et al. (2) have progressed molecular physics in a step that was unthinkable only a few years ago by laser-cooling a nonlinear polyatomic molecule, CaOCH₃.

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Quantum technologies, such as quantum computers, quantum sensing devices and quantum memory, have often been found to outperform traditional electronics in speed and performance, and could thus soon help humans to tackle a variety of problems more efficiently. Despite their huge potential, most quantum systems are inherently susceptible to errors and noise, which poses a serious challenge to implementing and using them in real-world settings.

The search is on to discover new states of matter, and possibly new ways of encoding, manipulating, and transporting information. One goal is to harness materials’ quantum properties for communications that go beyond what’s possible with conventional electronics. Topological insulators—materials that act mostly as insulators but carry electric current across their surface—provide some tantalizing possibilities.

“Exploring the complexity of topological materials—along with other intriguing emergent phenomena such as magnetism and superconductivity—is one of the most exciting and challenging areas of focus for the materials science community at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory,” said Peter Johnson, a senior physicist in the Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Science Division at Brookhaven. “We’re trying to understand these topological insulators because they have lots of potential applications, particularly in quantum information science, an important new area for the division.”

For example, materials with this split insulator/conductor personality exhibit a separation in the energy signatures of their surface electrons with opposite “spin.” This quantum property could potentially be harnessed in “spintronic” devices for encoding and transporting information. Going one step further, coupling these electrons with magnetism can lead to novel and exciting phenomena.

On GPT-3, achieving AGI, machine understanding and lots more… Will GPT-3 or an equivalent be used to deepfake human understanding?

Joscha Bach on GPT-3, achieving AGI, machine understanding and lots more
02:40 What’s missing in AI atm? Unified coherent model of reality
04:14 AI systems like GPT-3 behave as if they understand — what’s missing?
08:35 Symbol grounding — does GPT-3 have it?
09:35 GPT-3 for music generation, GPT-3 for image generation, GPT-3 for video generation
11:13 GPT-3 temperature parameter. Strange output?
13:09 GPT-3 a powerful tool for idea generation
14:05 GPT-3 as a tool for writing code. Will GPT-3 spawn a singularity?
16:32 Increasing GPT-3 input context may have a high impact
16:59 Identifying grammatical structure & language
19:46 What is the GPT-3 transformer network doing?
21:26 GPT-3 uses brute force, not zero-shot learning, humans do ZSL
22:15 Extending the GPT-3 token context space. Current Context = Working Memory. Humans with smaller current contexts integrate concepts over long time-spans
24:07 GPT-3 can’t write a good novel
25:09 GPT-3 needs to become sensitive to multi-modal sense data — video, audio, text etc
26:00 GPT-3 a universal chat-bot — conversations with God & Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
30:14 What does understanding mean? Does it have gradients (i.e. from primitive to high level)?
32:19 (correlation vs causation) What is causation? Does GPT-3 understand causation? Does GPT-3 do causation?
38:06 Deep-faking understanding
40:06 The metaphor of the Golem applied to civ
42:33 GPT-3 fine with a person in the loop. Big danger in a system which fakes understanding. Deep-faking intelligible explanations.
44:32 GPT-3 babbling at the level of non-experts
45:14 Our civilization lacks sentience — it can’t plan ahead
46:20 Would GTP-3 (a hopfield network) improve dramatically if it could consume 1 to 5 trillion parameters?
47:24 GPT3: scaling up a simple idea. Clever hacks to formulate the inputs
47:41 Google GShard with 600 billion input parameters — Amazon may be doing something similar — future experiments
49:12 Ideal grounding in machines
51:13 We live inside a story we generate about the world — no reason why GPT-3 can’t be extended to do this
52:56 Tracking the real world
54:51 MicroPsi
57:25 What is computationalism? What is it’s relationship to mathematics?
59:30 Stateless systems vs step by step Computation — Godel, Turing, the halting problem & the notion of truth
1:00:30 Truth independent from the process used to determine truth. Constraining truth that which can be computed on finite state machines
1:03:54 Infinities can’t describe a consistent reality without contradictions
1:06:04 Stevan Harnad’s understanding of computation
1:08:32 Causation / answering ‘why’ questions
1:11:12 Causation through brute forcing correlation
1:13:22 Deep learning vs shallow learning
1:14:56 Brute forcing current deep learning algorithms on a Matrioshka brain — would it wake up?
1:15:38 What is sentience? Could a plant be sentient? Are eco-systems sentient?
1:19:56 Software/OS as spirit — spiritualism vs superstition. Empirically informed spiritualism
1:23:53 Can we build AI that shares our purposes?
1:26:31 Is the cell the ultimate computronium? The purpose of control is to harness complexity
1:31:29 Intelligent design
1:33:09 Category learning & categorical perception: Models — parameters constrain each other
1:35:06 Surprise minimization & hidden states; abstraction & continuous features — predicting dynamics of parts that can be both controlled & not controlled, by changing the parts that can be controlled. Categories are a way of talking about hidden states.
1:37:29 ‘Category’ is a useful concept — gradients are often hard to compute — so compressing away gradients to focus on signals (categories) when needed
1:38:19 Scientific / decision tree thinking vs grounded common sense reasoning
1:40:00 Wisdom/common sense vs understanding. Common sense, tribal biases & group insanity. Self preservation, dunbar numbers
1:44:10 Is g factor & understanding two sides of the same coin? What is intelligence?
1:47:07 General intelligence as the result of control problems so general they require agents to become sentient
1:47:47 Solving the Turing test: asking the AI to explain intelligence. If response is an intelligible & testable implementation plan then it passes?
1:49:18 The term ‘general intelligence’ inherits it’s essence from behavioral psychology; a behaviorist black box approach to measuring capability
1:52:15 How we perceive color — natural synesthesia & induced synesthesia
1:56:37 The g factor vs understanding
1:59:24 Understanding as a mechanism to achieve goals
2:01:42 The end of science?
2:03:54 Exciting currently untestable theories/ideas (that may be testable by science once we develop the precise enough instruments). Can fundamental physics be solved by computational physics?
2:07:14 Quantum computing. Deeper substrates of the universe that runs more efficiently than the particle level of the universe?
2:10:05 The Fermi paradox
2:12:19 Existence, death and identity construction.

A heptagonal-lattice superconducting circuit, and the mathematics that describe it, provide tools for studying quantum mechanics in curved space.

According to John Wheeler’s summary of general relativity, “space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve.” How this relationship plays out at the quantum scale is not known, because extending quantum experiments to curved space poses a challenge. In 2019, Alicia Kollár and colleagues at Princeton University met that challenge with a photonic circuit that represents the negatively curved space of an expanding universe [1]. Now, Igor Boettcher and colleagues at the University of Maryland, College Park, describe those experiments with a new theoretical framework [2]. Together, the studies offer a toolkit for studying quantum mechanics in curved space that could help answer fundamental questions about cosmology.

In a universe that expands at an accelerating rate, space curves away from itself at every point, producing a saddle-like, hyperbolic geometry. To project hyperbolic space onto a plane, Kollár’s team etched a centimeter-sized chip with superconducting resonators arranged in a lattice of heptagonal tiles. By decreasing the tile size toward the edge of the chip, the researchers reproduced a perplexing property of hyperbolic space: most of its points exist on its boundary. As a result, photons moving through the circuit behave like particles moving in negatively curved space.

Natalia Herrera-Valencia and colleagues have successfully unscrambled entangled light after it has passed through a 2 m long multimode fibre. Led by Mehul Malik, the team at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh tackled the challenge using entanglement itself. The research was done in collaboration with a colleague at the University of Glasgow and is described in a recent paper in Nature Physics.

Light passing through a disordered (or “complex”) medium like atmospheric fog or a multimode fibre gets scattered, albeit in a known manner. As a result, the information carried by the light gets distorted but is preserved, and extra steps are needed to access it. This gets especially tricky for the transport of entangled states of light because the medium muddles up the quantum correlations. The states get “scrambled” and “unscrambling” becomes necessary to retrieve the original entangled states.

First photonic quantum computer on the cloud.

Even quantum computers make mistakes. Their computing ability is extraordinary, exceeding that of classical computers by far. This is because circuits in quantum computers are based on qubits that can represent not only zeroes or ones, but also superpositions of both states by using the principles of quantum mechanics. Despite their great potential, qubits are extremely fragile and prone to errors due to the interactions with the external environment.

To solve this crucial issue, an international research group developed and implemented a new protocol that protects fragile quantum information and corrects errors due to qubit loss. This research group published the results of their study in Nature.

“Developing a fully functioning quantum processor still represents a great challenge for scientists across the world,” explains Davide Vodola who is one of the authors of the study as well as a researcher at the University of Bologna. “This research allowed us, for the first time, to implement a protocol that can detect and, at the same time, correct errors due to qubit loss. This ability could prove to be essential for the future development of large-scale quantum computers.”