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I’m not a musician. I do enjoy listening to music very much and I tried picking up an instrument a few times. I never managed to keep at it for long enough to make anything you could call music. Being almost 40, it’s probably too late to really get into it in any serious way. However, I would say that at one point in my life I did play something that is a lot like an instrument: A laser. It turns out a laser is surprisingly similar to a unique electronic instrument called a modular synthesizer. Let me try and explain! ...

A beautiful plot The aesthetics of scientific plots is one of those things. You don’t have to know what makes something beautiful to recognize that it is beautiful. I’m not sure what provides a plot with that oomph, or je ne sais quoi. Is it just a great Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) that makes the eye sense that something real is being presented? It’s probably more than that! A straight-line plot with great SNR is not usually particularly beautiful. I’d suggest that some complexity has to pop up too, to make the viewer feel there’s interest here beyond the trivial. I’m sure you could train a neural network to sort pretty plots out from non-pretty ones but… whatever… This plot below, as I’m sure you’d agree is very pretty indeed. Tragically, due to very silly psychology reasons (and also maybe the follies of the Scientific Method), it has never seen the light of day until now. ...

Program, run, repeat Software development, like many creative activities, is an iterative process. You try to figure something out, have an initial thought about the correct way to go about things and give it a first go. In quantum algorithm development the same principle applies. You should start with a small model, see if it works and then work your way up in complexity. At the moment you can’t easily access a quantum processor with more than a few tens of qubits. Even for these smaller devices, queue times can be very long and larger systems are not freely accessible. Nothing is worse than developing your algorithm, sending it to sit in a queue for a week and then coming back to find the result is nonsense. Often you end up with a bunch of zeros just because you forgot an H gate somewhere (or your idea was just plain bad!) ...

This post was originally posted on the Classiq blog. Written with Ariel Smoler. Depending on who you ask, the size of the cyber security market is currently (as of August 2023) estimated at a few hundred billion USD/year. It’s harder to estimate the size of the internet-of-things market as the definitions are more vague than those of cyber-security. Is a web-connected-toaster an Internet-Of-Things (IOT) device? Sure, maybe, but what about a Radio-Frequency (RF) identification tag with a microchip embedded stuck on an egg carton? Yeah, that’s probably IoT-related too. Coincidentally, both examples can be targets for cyber-attacks. However, it’s unclear which evil cyber-capable red-tailed fox will likely target that lowly yet delicious, internet-connected treat. ...

This post was originally posted on the Classiq blog. Have you ever solved a Sudoku puzzle? It was pretty popular at some point in the early 2000s. For some reason, everyone was solving them all the time. Mind you, this is a time well before smartphones. People just didn’t have better things to do. If you haven’t heard of it, in a Sudoku, the goal is to fill a 9X9 grid with digits such that in each row and each column, each digit appears only once. This type of puzzle is an example of a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). These are problems where you have to “fill in the blanks” with an item (e.g., a digit) from a set of possibilities (e.g., the digits 1 through 9) but not break some set of rules (e.g., no repetitions of a digit), and they’re more common than you’d think. ...

So many qubits, so little time At the time of writing this there are at least five competing technologies vying for the quantum computing throne. Superconducting qubits, trapped ions, neutral atom arrays and silicon (CMOS) qubits are the top contenders. The various so-called “color centers”, a prominent example of which are Nitrogen-Vacancy centers in diamonds, arguably lagging behind. Using an eye-rollingly terrible expression, it’s ‘The Zoo of Qubits’ 🙄. They only reason I am willing to use it is because I do believe some of them are cute but useless, some are scary and may bite you, and It’s very likely most of them will be extinct soon. ...

Apprenticeship The education system in the UK has an apprenticeship path built into it. This path allows young people who wish to finish the purely academic chapter of their studies at 16 to acquire vocational skills. I’ve never done an apprenticeship myself, but I was enamored by the idea when I heard about it as a schoolboy. How I imagine an apprenticeship, which may be very different from what a British apprenticeship actually looks like, is like a movie montage. The young padawan becomes an expert via a progression of intricately designed and precisely exacting exercises. It’s the fantasy of having an all-knowing responsible adult thoughtfully guiding you. A very comforting dream which for me was also fuelled by books such as Shop craft as soul craft (which I read slightly later in life) and Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance which I really loved as a high school-er. ...

This post was originally posted on qubit.il, the israeli quantum community. זה ההייפ של הרגע. זו הבהלה לזהב של שנות ה20 של המאה ה-21. כתבות מחמיאות על חברות פורצות דרך, גיוסי כסף גדול ע"י צוותים קטנים שמתגבשים להם בחללי עבודה ברחבי הארץ והעולם ואפילו כמה הנפקות. הטכנולוגיה היא אינפורמציה קוונטית. זו עשויה להיות המהפכה הטכנולוגית הגדולה ביותר מאז מהפיכת האינפורמציה הקודמת, זו שהולידה מחשבים אישיים, טלפונים ניידים ואת האינטרנט. בקיצור: בהחלט יש פה סיפור שיכול להיות ביג דיל. ...

A very short intro to bosonic codes (Cats) This is an informal introduction to Bosonic qubits in circuit QED greatly inspired by: Atharv Joshi et al 2021 Quantum Sci. Technol. 6 033001 Bosons 🤡? It’s not strictly important we understand what bosons are. However, I know that at least for me seeing a funny word I don’t know is a distractor when reading something new. I just have to know what the word means. So let’s get it out of the way as quickly as possible. ...

How do you calculate 1+1 on a quantum computer? Uri Levy’s question There’s something about being part of a group that’s wonderfully transformative. You drink coffee with some people, day in, day out, for a few years, and start speaking a common language. You work with them, commute with them, and walk past them in the halls. And you end up being like them or at least trying to be. Working in the Weizmann Institute’s (WIS) complex system department was indeed a very transformative environment. There are many ways in which this place has a language of its own. There’s the science, of course. It’s the atoms, ions, lasers, magnets, resonators, and nonlinear crystals. It’s catching the end of someone’s sentence when walking by “…and that’s just adiabatic elimination once again!”. But there’s more to that than just that. It’s also about how people reason about the world in general. How they explain themselves and question others. Encountering someone who thinks very clearly can be magical. I tried back then, as I do now, to emulate such figures. The school of thought of members of the faculty such as Nir Davidson, Ofer Firstenberg, Roee Ozeri, and others. It’s a school whose motto is always trying to distill an idea to its simplest and most condensed form and (usually) doing so kindly. Another of these figures is Dr. Uri Levy. A physicist who had roamed those halls as a young student. He then pursued a career in physics in industry, only to return once more as a moth to the flame. Uri has a way of asking questions that is like Socratic dialogue. They are delivered with quiet honesty but tend to find weak spots in the argument, like a stinger missile hitting a Russian tank. After leaving WIS’s comforts, I started working on quantum computers. Uri was curious and called me one day to ask, “So, I know quantum computers will break cryptography. But how do I even use one to calculate 1+1”? I promised Uri an answer for a while and kept putting it off. The rest of this post, which started with a long-winded (and superfluous) introduction, aims to address this question and to do so in the spirit of the complex systems department. ...