Author Archives: Pontifex Praeteritorum

API is an abbreviation that stands for “Application Program Interface.” Roughly speaking an API is a specification of a software component in terms of the operations one can perform with that component. For example, a common kind of an API … Continue reading →

Talks from QIP 2015 are now available on this YouTube channel. Great to see! I’m still amazed by the wondrous technology that allows me to watch talks given on the other side of the world, at my own leisure, on … Continue reading →

A QIP 2015 epilogue: our notes from the business meeting. See also this post by Kaushik Seshadreesan. Business Meeting Report local organizing committee report Finance: $193,545 – $191,467 = $2,478 profit! registration income: $185,340 refunds, about $3,000 external sponsorships: $30,450, … Continue reading →

Today’s highlight: an algorithm running in time , also known as “polynomial time” or “efficient”. Joseph Fitzsimons and Thomas Vidick. A multiprover interactive proof system for the local Hamiltonian problem(Plenary Talk) abstract arXiv:1409.0260 Thomas begins by reminding everyone about what … Continue reading →

Warning for typical QIP attendees — This first talk may have some implications for the real world Andrea Mari, Vittorio Giovannetti, Alexander S. Holevo, R. Garcia-Patron and N. J. Cerf. Majorization and entropy at the output of bosonic Gaussian channels. … Continue reading →

We promise we’ll finish posting these soon! Day 3 was only a half day of talks with a free afternoon, and the rainy weather of the first two days finally subsided just in time. Jean-Pierre Tillich Decoding Quantum LDPC Codes … Continue reading →

From the team that brought you “QIP 2015 Day 1 liveblogging“, here is the exciting sequel. Will they build a quantum computer? Will any complexity classes collapse? Will any results depend on the validity of the Extended Riemann Hypothesis? Read … Continue reading →

Jan 14 update at the end. The three Pontiffs are reunited at QIP 2015 and, having forgotten how painful liveblogging was in the past, are doing it again. This time we will aim for some slightly more selective comments. In … Continue reading →

To everyone that’s attending QIP, welcome to Sydney! Since I’ve already had to clarify a number of the finer points of Australian slang to my fellow attendees, I thought I would solve the general problem and simply post a helpful dictionary that translates some … Continue reading →

Perhaps the greatest shock I’ve had in moving from the hallowed halls of academia to the workman depths of everyday software development is the amount of testing that is done when writing code. Likely I’ve written more test code than … Continue reading →