[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] Postdoc ad: quantum-computing programming languages

[Darren Grant]

Research interest is in the way such a machine might work, rather than the
possible (unlikely) affront to ontology.

Demanding a priori documentation is a bit disingenuous as the land is
undiscovered.

Cheers,
Darren
On Mar 31, 2016 19:24, "Jerzy Karczmarczuk" <jerzy.karczmarczuk at unicaen.fr>
wrote:

> Hello.
>
> Le 31/03/2016 22:04, Scott Pakin a écrit :
>
>> My institution just bought a D-Wave 2X adiabatic quantum computer.
>> The problem is, no one really has a grasp on how to *program* an
>> adiabatic quantum computer.  It's a totally different beast from the
>> gate-model quantum computers that most people imply when they talk
>> about quantum computing.
>>
> I find all this a bit disturbing...
> Los Alamos buys an expensive device that nobody knows how to use??
>
> Moreover, in circumstances where the doubts about the real performance of
> the D-Wave computer stii persist?
>
> Several physicists refuse to call this contraption a "quantum computer".
> The statements about their "qubits" in their public materials are not
> always serious, there is practically nothing about a genuine state
> superposition, no educated physicist will buy such pseudo-definition as
> "having simultaneously the values 0 and 1" (being the result of two
> currents flowing in opposite directions ; what about phase?).
>
> Their "white paper" about the map colouring shows a model which is more
> similar to a Hopfield (or similar) neural network, rather than a quantum
> computing device. The optimization is a natural application domain of such
> networks, but where are some more universal examples?
>
> Surely, there are quantum elements in it: superconducting niobium rings,
> Josephson junctions, etc. But, actually, even a plain transistor is a
> quantum device as well, and nobody dares to call it a "qubit". Their native
> code seems to be extremely far from quantum theory, as we know it.
>
> =
> But, if the device works, has some affinities with neural stuff and with
> Monte-Carlo techniques (annealing), perhaps a good playground for testing
> it would be a Go player?
>
> Jerzy Karczmarczuk
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