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.
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