Monthly Archive for August, 2009

To-Do List 11762

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I’m writing this here mostly for myself.

  1. Send off a whole bunch of résumés and cover letters.
  2. Post my research notes along with commentary online.
  3. Find a source code repository to host sample projects that I’ve worked on, and upload them.
  4. Keep writing (anything), just for practice.

– davinci 11762

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Schrödinger’s LOLcat

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Schrödinger's LOLcat

This is my cat Heisenberg, illustrating the “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment.

– davinci 11751

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Adversary lower bounds in the Hamiltonian oracle model

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When I switched into quantum computing for my Ph.D. topic, one of the the first research questions that my (former) supervisor, Dr. Richard Cleve, had asked me was whether the adversary method for quantum lower bounds applied in the Hamiltonian oracle model.

The answer is “yes”… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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A John Adams quote

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I recently read that the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, is apparently tweeting from the grave. This is a nice use of technology to try to get younger people interested in history, but I’m not sure that it’ll be that effective. If people generally aren’t interested in comments about the weather, they’re probably not going to be interested in comments about the weather from two hundred years ago. But who knows?

Seeing the story reminded me of one of my favourite quotes by his father, John Adams… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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Names and careers, or nominative determinism

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Two random events inspired me to write this post. The first is that Toby Cubitt gave a talk at IQC recently. (I didn’t attend the talk, but I did receive the announcement.) The second is that I chanced upon the book Quirkology by psychologist Richard Wiseman. (Another influence for this post is the fact that job hunting is clearly still on my mind.)

In high school, a friend and I had noticed that several of the people we had to learn about in class had names which were oddly apropos of the accomplishments for which they were famous, and so we started to compile a list. At the head of the list was Robert Boyle, who studied the inverse relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of an ideal gas at a fixed temperature. Another name on the list was Alexander Graham Bell. (”You rang?”)… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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  1. Frequently Asked Questions about my name
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Job hunting and positive character traits

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Since I have dropped out of university, I am looking for work, or, to use a common expression, “hunting for a job”.

I find the expression humorous — for me, it conjures up the image of a certain bulbous cartoon huntsman on the trail of a wise-cracking, carrot-munching leporid. But I hope that the outcome is more favourable for me than is usually the case for our animated friend… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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  1. To-Do List 11762
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Slides from TQC 2008

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Last year, I gave a talk at TQC on “Quantum Algorithms for Evaluating Min-Max Trees”[1], co-authored by Dr. Richard Cleve, Dr. Dmitry Gavinsky, and myself.

In the talk, I presented an algorithm which combines the Nand tree evaluation quantum algorithm of Farhi, Goldstone, and Gutmann[2] with Grover’s search in a clever way (if I do say so myself) to evaluate Min-Max trees, with the same asymptotic cost in queries as for Nand trees.

I’ve uploaded the slides to SlideShare, and also embedded them in this post below… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 9: exposed
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Something new every day

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When I was in the gifted program in elementary school, I was taught to keep a journal, in which I should write about “something new every day”. This was a habit that I had kept up for years, with only brief interruptions until a few years ago, when I started to become depressed.

I think this habit played a significant role in my extraordinary productivity in high school. During that time, my journal entries were often just a summary of the day’s events. This meant that I had to pay attention to what was happening around me, whether in class or outside, pick out the most important facts, and retain them in memory until I could write them down and comment on them. I would also finalise and review each entry just before I went to bed, so that the highlights of the day were fresh in my mind as I fell asleep… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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Using the Ajaxified Expand Post Now plug-in with Rob Miller’s Footnotes plug-in

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This is a little technical post for anyone who is interested in using the Ajaxified Expand Post NOW plug-in[1] and Rob Miller’s Footnotes plug-in[2] together. On this website, I’m running AEPN version 0.7 beta 7, Footnotes version 1.2.1, and WordPressμ version 2.8.2, which are the latest versions as of this writing.

The AEPN plug-in truncates a post and appends an… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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