Researchers from the University of Bristol have discovered that super-powerful quantum computers, which scientists and engineers across the world are racing to build, need to be even more powerful than previously thought before they can beat today’s classical computers. Research groups at leading universities and companies, including Google, Microsoft and IBM, are part of a …
Quantum Monte Carlo methods use random sampling to analyze many-body quantum problems where the equations involved cannot be solved directly. Ringel and Kovrizhi showed that attempts to use quantum Monte Carlo to model systems exhibiting anomalies, such as the quantum Hall effect, will always become unworkable. They discovered that the complexity of the simulation increased …
At the Symposium on Computational Geometry in July, Erik Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi of the University of Tokyo will announce the completion of a quest that began with a 1999 paper: a universal algorithm for folding origami shapes that guarantees a minimum number of seams. “In 1999, we proved that you could fold any polyhedron, …
Elon Musks Boring company wants to do just three things to get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and beyond that. 1. Cut the tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. So a single road lane tunnel according to regulations has to be 26 feet, maybe 28 feet in diameter to allow …
Scott Aaronson talked about the China quantum computer researchers achieving 5 photon boson sampling and the theoretical work of a Bristol team. The Bristol give numerical evidence that BosonSampling, with n photons and m modes, can be approximately simulated by a classical computer in “merely” about n2n time (that is, the time needed to calculate …
Physicist Edward Boyda of St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga and colleagues fed hundreds of NASA satellite images of California into the D-Wave 2X processor, which contains 1152 qubits. The researchers asked the computer to consider dozens of features—hue, saturation, even light reflectance—to determine whether clumps of pixels were trees as opposed to roads, …
Researchers developed an alteration to the lithium-sulfur battery that could make it more than competitive with the industry standard lithium-ion battery. The lithium-sulfur battery, long thought to be better at energy storage capacity than its more popular lithium-ion counterpart, was hampered by its short cycle life. Currently the lithium-sulfur battery can be recharged 50 to …
The University of Pennsylvania has a life expectancy calculator based upon on a statistical regression of more than 400,000 data samples. The data was collected by the National Institute of Health and AARP. Major longevity factors that are under your control are * Education level (college educated live longer) * Marital Status (married live longer) …
Researchers demonstrate that superconductor critical temperature can be raised above room-temperature to ≈ 400K in cuprates by precise control of the spatial separation of dopants. Hence, there still remains substantial “latent” Tc in cuprates. Their proposed doping strategy and superconducting mechanism is not restricted to cuprates and may be exploited in other materials. Their room-temperature …
According to the US Navy, 53 percent of all Navy aircraft can’t fly — about 1,700 combat aircraft, patrol, and transport planes and helicopters. Not all are due to budget problems — at any given time, about one-fourth to one-third of aircraft are out of service for regular maintenance. But the 53 percent figure represents …
There are adiabatic factoring algorithms and methods. Dwave is focused on optimization problems, however the system can be used to solve other problems including factoring. In November 2014, it was discovered that this 2012 adiabatic quantum computation had also factored larger numbers, the largest being 56153. A paper in 2016 discussed factoring with Dwave using …