Quantum entanglement by classical computer: a crucial experiment
Luigi Accardi, Centro V. Volterra, Roma

A simple experiment is described in which two experimenters, by performing independent, local, binary choices on a common classical, deterministic, macroscopic source of randomness (in fact a generator of random points in the unit disk in the plane) and computing the empirical correlations among their results, arrive to a violation of Bell's inequalities. The local binary choices satisfy all the standard conditions of the EPR experiment: singlet, equiprobability, rotation invariance, etc.

In addition the experiment suggests a new interpretation of the usual EPR experiment, more natural and appealing from the physical point of view than the usual one and totally in line with the "chameleon effect" which is at the basis of the quantum probabilistic approach to the theory of quantum measurement.

A mathematical formulation of the "chameleon effect" will be discussed and illustrated with the mathematical model used to write the computer programme used in the experiment. The result of the present experiment, which for a long time has been considered to be impossible by the majority of physicists, fully confirms the point of view advocated, starting from the late 70's, by quantum probability in absolute isolation and strongly opposed by the majority of physicists who, following the interpretation due to Bell, were relating the violation of Bell's inequality to a non locality effect.

In particular the experiment proves that:

(i) it is possible to produce non-Kolmogorovian correlations by local realistic classical deterministic macroscopic systems

(ii) it is possible to produce quantum entanglement by classical
computer

This opens the way to a series of new possibilities, for example the possibility of implementing quantum cryptography by classical computer. The experiment will be described and performed during the talk and the public will have the possibility to check the procedure by choosing the parameters of the measurements. An earlier version of the experiment is available at the Volterra Institute.

Chips Coming to a Brain Near You

In this era of high-tech memory management, next in line to get that memory upgrade isn't your computer, it's you.

Professor Theodore W. Berger , director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California, is creating a silicon chip implant that mimics the hippocampus, an area of the brain known for creating memories. If successful, the artificial brain prosthesis could replace its biological counterpart, enabling people who suffer from memory disorders to regain the ability to store new memories.

And it's no longer a question of "if" but "when." The six teams involved in the multi-laboratory effort, including USC, the University of Kentucky and Wake Forest University, have been working together on different components of the neural prosthetic for nearly a decade. They will present the results of their efforts at the Society for Neuroscience 's annual meeting in San Diego, which begins Saturday.

While they haven't tested the microchip in live rats yet, their research using slices of rat brain indicates the chip functions with 95 percent accuracy. It's a result that's got the scientific community excited.

"It's a new direction in neural prosthesis," said Howard Eichenbaum , director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neurobiology at Boston University. "The Berger enterprise is ambitious, aiming to provide a prosthesis for memory. The need is high, because of the prevalence of memory disorder in aging and disease associated with loss of function in the hippocampus."

Forming new long-term memories may involve such tasks as learning to recognize a new face, or remembering a telephone number or directions to a new location. Success depend on the proper functioning of the hippocampus. While this part of the brain doesn't store long-term memories, it re-encodes short-term memory so it can be stored as long-term memory.

It's the area that's often damaged as a result of head trauma, stroke, epilepsy and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. Currently, no clinically recognized treatments exist for a damaged hippocampus and the accompanying memory disorders.

Berger's team began its research by studying the re-encoding process performed by neurons in slices of rat hippocampi kept alive in nutrients. By stimulating these neurons with randomly generated computer signals and studying the output patterns, the group determined a set of mathematical functions that transformed any given arbitrary input pattern in the same manner that the biological neurons do. And according to the researchers, that's the key to the whole issue.

"It's an impossible task to figure out what your grandmother looks like and how I would encode that," said Berger. "We all do a lot of different things, so we can't create a table of all the things we can possibly look at and how it's encoded in the hippocampus. What we can do is ask, 'What kind of transformation does the hippocampus perform?'

"If you can figure out how the inputs are transformed, then you do have a prosthesis. Then I could put that into somebody's brain to replace it, and I don't care what they look at -- I've replaced the damaged hippocampus with the electronic one, and it's going to transform inputs into outputs just like the cells of the biological hippocampus."

Dr. John J. Granacki , director of the Advanced Systems Division at USC, has been working on translating these mathematical functions onto a microchip. The resulting chip is meant to simulate the processing of biological neurons in the slice of rat hippocampus: accepting electrical impulses, processing them and then sending on the transformed signals. The researchers say the microchip is doing exactly that, with a stunning 95 percent accuracy rate.

"If you were looking at the output right now, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the biological hippocampus and the microchip hippocampus," Berger said. "It looks like it's working."

The team next plans to work with live rats that are moving around and learning, and will study monkeys later. The researchers will investigate drugs or other means that could temporarily deactivate the biological hippocampus, and implant the microchip on the animal's head, with electrodes into its brain.

"We will attempt to adapt the artificial hippocampus to the live animal and then show that the animal's performance -- dependent in these tasks on an intact hippocampus -- will not be compromised when the device is in place and we temporarily interrupt the normal function of the hippocampus," said Sam A. Deadwyler , "thus allowing the neuro-prosthetic device to take over that normal function." Deadwyler, a professor at Wake Forest University, is working on measuring the hippocampal neuron activity in live rats and monkeys.

The team expects it will take two to three years to develop the mathematical models for the hippocampus of a live, active rat and translate them onto a microchip, and seven or eight years for a monkey. They hope to apply this approach to clinical applications within 10 years. If everything goes well, they anticipate seeing an artificial human hippocampus, potentially usable for a variety of clinical disorders, in 15 years.

Overall, experts find the results promising.

"We are nowhere near applicability," said Boston University's Eichenbaum. "But the next decade will prove whether this strategy is truly feasible."

"There is a big gap in making the microchip work in a slice preparation and getting it to work in a human being," added Norbert Fortin, a neuroscientist from the Cognitive Neurobiology Lab at Boston University. "However, their approach is very methodical, and it is not unreasonable to think that in 15 to 20 years such a chip could help, to some degree, a patient who suffered from hippocampal damage."

Research Group, Wired Link

HPC

Rapid Single Flux Quantum [RSFQ] superconducting logic circuits
Hybrid Technology Multithreaded Architecture [HTMT]
Cray Cascade Project

Remote Sensing Applications

Quantum information science garners a number of advantages in metrology and remote sensing applications. NASA's JPL Quantum Computing Technologies division is actively pursuing research in these areas:

Quantum Lithography
Quantum Gyroscopes
Quantum Clock Synchronization
SQUID- Based Atom Interferometric Gravity Gradiometers

Quantum Information Science and Technology Project Tokyo, Japan The QUIST/Tokyo team recently visited Korea to visit national quantum information research centers in the region, with focus on recent developments in quantum algorithms. We traveled to the Quantum Information Sciences laboratory at Korea Institute for Advanced Study, led by Dr. Jaewan Kim, and to the School of Mathematical Sciences at Seoul National University, led by principal researcher Dr. Dong Pyo Chi. A public copy of the report is available as ATIP04.004.

NATO ARW on Quantum Chaos Como, Italy I recently presented on superconducting quantum computing at the NATO/ARO Advanced Research Workshop on Quantum Chaos. "The Workshop was organized to assess the state of the art in an authoritative and unprecedented way - to set the goals of the new frontiers of quantum chaos, the dynamics of complex systems, the feasibility of quantum computing, the development of new photonic devices, and to bring to light the seeds of new perspectives."

Coding Theory and Quantum Computing Charlottesville, Virginia – I recently attended the NSF Conference and Workshop on Coding Theory and Quantum Computing at University of Virginia. Lectures were given by many of the field's pioneers, including Robert Calderbank, Samuel Lomonaco, Jr., David Meyer, Steven van Enk, and Casper H. van der Wal. Video proceedings from the conference are now online.

International Conference on High Energy Physics XXXI Amsterdam I recently attended the 31st biannual conference on high-energy physics from 24-31 July 2002 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ICHEP continues in the tradition of the Rochester conferences, a long held cornerstone of the international physics community. Highlights included a public lecture by Gerard 't Hooft, Nobel laureate, physics, 1999.

Quantum Topology

Roman Zapatrin, Quantum topologist

Roman Zapatrin | Starlab 

Roman R. Zapatrin is working on the "Quantum Topology" project. He has recently developed mathematical methods which take away the last pieces of ground under our feet: Einstein took away the predefined metric from spacetime, and Roman Zapatrin – with his physicist colleagues – is taking away spacetime itself.

Another possible application of quantum topological jumps, for which he has provided the theory, is to store information for quantum computers. He graduated from St. Petersburg State University as a pure mathematician. He does not respect any kind of scientific supervision, nor any academic degree; indeed his university diploma was written by himself.

He is an accomplished composer and musician; he plays the balalaika, the domra, the mandola and the mandolon-cello. He enjoys unconventional and ‘uncivilized’ travelling - crossing snow passes in the Alps with a small folding bike, or skiing in the Russian backwoods. He claims just to be providing tools which to wrestle with Nature's challenges.

For several years he worked on quantum logic, and managed to build the theory of automata simulating quantum system; after that he began grappling with the quantization of spacetime. Still, for him, his main achievement is that he is happy with what he is doing. Roman Zapatrin believes that—theoretically at least—we shall be able to change spacetime, so that by a click we may change both the future and the past.

Quantum Topology 

Physical phenomena are supposed to require an arena in which they may occur. That stadium is spacetime. But in the quantum realm is there such an arena—that is to say, does the stadium exist before the game begins? Or does it emerge as we observe it? Can we change spacetime? May we alter the past without time travel?

It is by now generally accepted that, in the quantum realm entities—minuscule particles—somehow come into existence at the instant that they are observed. In the study of quantum topology there may be different scales at which explorations may be conducted, ranging from the very small to the entire universe.

According to the laws of quantum mechanics a basic assumption is made: an assumption of a pre-existing structure. At the very small scale all attempts to observe that assumed structure inevitably change the topology itself; the large amount of energy which has to be applied distorts the arena's very structure.

The topic of quantum topology spawned two projects at Starlab:

Project Aphrodite: Spacetime Foam

The beauteous Aphrodite, she of the wondrous form, took shape and emerged, fully made in her perfection, out of the foam. The notion of spacetime as foam dates from ideas put forward by John Wheeler of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study during the 1960's. The Aphrodite project aims to dive deep into the broth of geometrical fluctuations and give perfect shape to that which was formless.

This project explores the structure of spacetime at the Planckian scale. The Planck length is the smallest naturally occurring measurement used by scientists: about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a centimetre. It is at this scale those quantum phenomena and the arena—or the topology in which they occur—emerge as they are observed.

The task here is to provide a mathematical solution to this physical problem. There is no desire to give up Einsteinian relativity; it presents a very good working model, in its domain of application. But at the sub-Planckian scale, Einstein's theory cannot even be tested. Because it is not testable, the notion of pre-existing spacetime is swept away and may be replaced by an appropriate quantum observable–an entity whose values at the moment it is measured.

Then care is taken to make this work compatible with existing working theories such as relativity, so that the beautiful Aphrodite may be safe wherever she roams.

Project Undo: Topology Leaps

Undo follows from the claims of quantum topology. `Undo' involves the changing of spacetime.
Say for instance that an explosion has occurred; in principle it is possible that by observation itself the arena that is spacetime may be so altered that the explosion did not occur. In this sense it has been undone.

This is a quasi undoing or altering, which occurs as a result of appropriate measurement. This would not be possible without quantum effects, and the goal of this project is to find appropriate measurements of spacetime, which involve those effects. Quantum measurements are those which unavoidably effect that which is being measured. The point about this process is that it is the act of measurement itself, which creates the stadium, and further measurements may create altered or different stadia. This is not the same as travelling back in time; what takes place is an alteration so that a previous setting is undone, in the sense that it did not exist.

Einstein claimed that the past and the future are in a given, predefined or frozen spacetime. The Undo project melts it.

US National Labs Salishan Fellowship

Salishan | Algorithms, Architecture, Language

LANL | LLNL | LBNL | SNL
Los Alamos | Lawrence Livermore | Lawrence Berkeley | Sandia

Christopher Altman — Research foci include high-performance computing (HTMT), solid-state superconducting nanoelectronics, macroscopic quantum coherence and computation, quantum infomation processing in Josephson junction nanocircuits.

I was honored to participate in the US National Labs Conference on High-Speed Computing from April 23-27, 2001 at Westin Salishan in Gleneden Beach, Oregon. Salishan is a half-mile's walk from the beach, a picturesque, mist-covered mountain resort that has been the setting for the conference since its inception.

The conference, founded in 1980, was founded as a means of getting experts in computer architecture, languages, and algorithms together to improve communications, develop collaborations, solve problems of mutual interest, and provide effective leadership in the field of high speed computing. Attendance is by invitation only, and limited to about 170 of the best and brightest in the world.

The conference is sponsored by Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as being co-sponsored by a number private companies—this year volunteering sponsors included Compaq, Cray Inc., Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, SAIC, SGI, StorageTek, and Sun Microsystems.

A highlight of the conference was the informal discussions held each evening in Salishan's Sunset Suite, a forum to exchange ideas, solve problems, and develop friendships. This year's talks profiled recent developments in nanotechnology, supercomputing, microelectromechanical systems, large-scale networks, memory architectures, data management, artificial intelligence, molecular electronics, and a number of other technologies that will significantly impact the future of information science and technology.

The meeting was a stimulating and challenging week of close interaction with many of the most creative minds in the field. I'd like to extend my gratitude to the many inspiring scientists with whom I had the opportunity to meet at Salishan—and to those who helped to make my attendance possible, including Fernand “Doc” Bedard, Horst Simon, David Kahaner, Brett Berlin, Will Stackhouse, Jim McGraw, Kathy Turnbeaugh, Dennis Bohnenkamp, and Lala Stone.

It was an honor to attend under support of a Salishan fellowship, to meet and discuss large-scale networks with H. Shrikumar and paintable computers with Bill Butera. I look forward to meeting both again on my next trip to the Media Lab.

Special thanks go to Horst Simon for our continuing discussions on high-performance computing and the HTMT architecture, and to Doc Bedard for his guidance, advice, and for answering my questions while exploring ideas on imaginative walks through the forested grounds of Salishan. My interest in Josephson Junction RSFQ superconducting nanoelectronics has been in no small part due to Bedard's Random Access talk, and the influence of our continued discussions throughout the week.

Notwithstanding revolutionary hardware breakthroughs, the next generation of high-performance computing systems will continue to be reliant upon low-temperature superconducting nanoelectronics. Moore's Law ensures their dimensions will shrink rapidly. As we enter the era of quantum information processing, this is certain to be a productive and exciting area of research.


Proceedings

Application Requirements and Current System Architectures

An Overview of Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship
James Mercer-Smith, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Requirements for Large-Scale Massively Parallel Computing
Robert Weaver, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Sandia C-Plant Clusters
Art Hale, Sandia National Laboratories

LLNL ASCI Platforms
Mark Seager, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Future System Architectures

HEC Architectures in the 21st Century: Drivers and Imperatives
Thomas Sterling, Caltech

High Performance and High Density Archives
Jim Hughes, StorageTek

Future Communications and Networking
Marc Beackon, Lucent Technologies

From Problem Definition to Problem Setup

An Introduction to the Challenges of Problem Setup
Robert Leland, Sandia National Labs

Responses to Analysis / CAD Integration Perplexities
Ted Blacker, Fluent, Inc.

Computational Problem Setup: An Industrial Perspective
Todd Michal, Boeing

Unstructured Meshing
Glen Hanson, Los Alamos National Laboratory

A Heirarchical Data Management System for Parallel Partitioning of Adaptive Communication
Joe Flaherty, Renssalaer Polytechnic University

CAD to Results: The Snowball Effect
David White, Cargegie-Mellon University

From Problem Setup to Result Data

Performance Metrics: Out of the Dark Ages
David Bailey, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

State of the Art in Programming Tools
John Levesque, Times N Systems

Addressing the Memory Bottleneck
Sally McKee, University of Utah

Random Access Talks

NASA's digital library initiative
Eugene Miya, NASA Ames Research Center

Evolutionary Hardware
de Garis, Starlab NV/SA

OSCAR and the Open Cluster Group

ASCI Setup
Sandia National Laboratory

Self-adapting software
Jim Hughes, INFOSEC

Josephson Junction RSFQ Superconducting nanoelectronics
Fernand Bedard, National Security Agency

ATIP Activities in East Asia
David Kahaner, Asian Technology Information Program

Alan Huang, Stanford University

Norm Whittaker

From Result Data to Insight

Is Visualization a Solved Problem?
Sam Uselton, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Large Scale Scientific Data Management and Analysis
Alok Choudhary, Northwestern University

Can Data Mining Ever be a Gigabit Application? Lessons from DataSpace
Robert Grossmsan, University of Illinois, Chicago

Schooling in the Digital Age
Sara Armstrong, PhD, George Lucas Educational Foundation


MEMS: Micro-Electrical Mechanical Systems


A Smaller Hammer
William S. Trimmer, Standard MEMS Inc.

MEMS Modeling: Pushing the Limits of Miniaturization
Robert Rudd, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Artificial Brains and Self-Configuring Electronics

Artificial Brains: Today and Tomorrow
de Garis, Starlab NV/SA

Gate Array, Configure Thyself
Nick Macias, Cell Matrix Corp

An Approach to Designing Extremely Large, Extremely Parallel Systems
Lisa Durbeck, Cell Matrix Corp

Molecular Computing and Myriad Nets

Defect Tolerant Molecular Electronics Algorithms, Architectures, and Atoms
Philip Kuekes, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

Myriad Nets: De-Layering to Scale Networks up to the Billions
H. Shrikumar, MIT Media Laboratory

Future Directions

Programming a Paintable Computer
Bill Butera, MIT Media Laboratory

The Future of High Performance Computing: Dynamic Translation and High Density Computing
Dave Taylor, Transmeta Corporation