Lifeboat Foundation

Bright graphics, a touchscreen, a speech synthesizer, messaging apps, games, and educational software—no, it’s not your kid’s iPad. This is the mid-1970s, and you’re using PLATO.

Far from its comparatively primitive contemporaries of teletypes and punch cards, PLATO was something else entirely. If you were fortunate enough to be near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) around a half-century ago, you just might have gotten a chance to build the future. Many of the computing innovations we treat as commonplace started with this system, and even today, some of PLATO’s capabilities have never been precisely duplicated. Today, we’ll look back on this influential technological testbed and see how you can experience it now.

From space race to Spacewar.

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From early detection and internal treatment of diseases to futuristic applications like augmenting human memory, biological computing, or biocomputing, has the potential to revolutionize medicine and computers.

Traditional computer hardware is limited in its ability to interface with living organs, which has constrained the development of medical devices. Computerized implants require a constant supply of electricity, they can cause scarring in soft tissue that makes them unusable and they cannot heal themselves the way organisms can. Through the use of biological molecules such as DNA or proteins, biocomputing has the potential to overcome these limitations.

Continue reading “New biocomputing method uses enzymes as catalysts for DNA-based molecular computing” »

A tiny vibrating crystal weighing little more than a grain of sand has become the heaviest object ever to be recorded in a superposition of locations.

Physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich coupled a mechanical resonator to a type of superconducting circuit commonly used in quantum computing to effectively replicate Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment on an unprecedented scale.

Ironically, Schrödinger would be somewhat skeptical that anything so large – well, anything at all – could exist in a nebulous state of reality.

Encoding breakthrough allows for solving wider set of applications using neutral-atom quantum computers. QuEra Computing and university researchers have developed a method to expand the optimization calculations possible with neutral-atom quantum computers. This breakthrough, published in PRX Quantum, overcomes hardware limitations, enabling solutions to more complex problems, thus broadening applications in industries like logistics and pharmaceuticals.

Topological superconductors are superconducting materials with unique characteristics, including the appearance of so-called in-gap Majorana states. These bound states can serve as qubits, making topological superconductors particularly promising for the creation of quantum computing technologies.

Some physicists have recently been exploring the potential for creating quantum systems that integrate superconductors with swirling configurations of atomic magnetic dipoles (spins), known as quantum skyrmion crystals. Most of these efforts suggested sandwiching quantum skyrmion crystals between superconductors to achieve topological superconductivity.

Kristian Mæland and Asle Sudbø, two researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, have recently proposed an alternative model system of topological superconductivity, which does not contain superconducting materials. This theoretical model, introduced in Physical Review Letters, would instead use a sandwich structure of a heavy metal, a magnetic insulator, and a normal metal, where the heavy metal induces a quantum skyrmion crystal in the magnetic insulator.

Advances in quantum computation for electronic structure, and particularly heuristic quantum algorithms, create an ongoing need to characterize the performance and limitations of these methods. Here we discuss some potential pitfalls connected with the use of hardware-efficient Ansätze in variational quantum simulations of electronic structure. We illustrate that hardware-efficient Ansätze may break Hamiltonian symmetries and yield nondifferentiable potential energy curves, in addition to the well-known difficulty of optimizing variational parameters. We discuss the interplay between these limitations by carrying out a comparative analysis of hardware-efficient Ansätze versus unitary coupled cluster and full configuration interaction, and of second-and first-quantization strategies to encode Fermionic degrees of freedom to qubits.

Computer simulations of a human brain under the influence of LSD show that entropy increases the most in regions responsible for processing vision and integrating sensory information.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Understanding the interactions between quantum physics and gravity within a black hole is one of the thorniest problems in physics, but quantum computers could soon offer an answer.

By Alex Wilkins

Universal computation has significant real-world implications in fields such as computer science, physics, biology, and beyond. It is highly relevant to simulation metaphysics and its idea that the physical world could be a type of computer simulation.