Quantum Computing

There have been some advances in quantum computing this year that have been off my radar.  I just read an article about "D-wave," with hundreds of tiny liquid helium-cooled loops of niobium serving as quantum bits.  It is either "35,000 times faster -- or 100 times slower" than current computers depending on how you benchmark it.  The problem according to this cnet article (link) is how do you compare a quantum computer to traditional silicon chip processors, which can be good at very different things.  Although, according to this Wired article quote it's already pretty impressive "[the traditional computer] had the best algorithm ever developed by a team of the top scientists in the world, finely tuned to compete on what this processor does, running on the fastest processors that humans have ever been able to build,” Rose says. And the D-Wave “is now competitive with those things, which is a remarkable step.”

I recommend reading the Wired article; it contains a lot of background.  I'm copying this paragraph to pique your interest. 
"The dream of quantum computing has always been shrouded in sci-fi hope and hoopla—with giddy predictions of busted crypto, multiverse calculations, and the entire world of computation turned upside down. But it may be that quantum computing arrives in a slower, sideways fashion: as a set of devices used rarely, in the odd places where the problems we have are spoken in their curious language. Quantum computing won’t run on your phone—but maybe some quantum process of Google’s will be key in training the phone to recognize your vocal quirks and make voice recognition better. Maybe it’ll finally teach computers to recognize faces or luggage. Or maybe, like the integrated circuit before it, no one will figure out the best-use cases until they have hardware that works reliably. It’s a more modest way to look at this long-heralded thunderbolt of a technology. But this may be how the quantum era begins: not with a bang, but a glimmer." 

Warp ship design concept

I blogged a bit on the idea behind this earlier (link).  NASA's Eagleworks Labs are working on an honest to goodness potentially faster than light spaceship drive system.  You can't cross space in a faster than light fashion, but space can bend (compress/expand) faster than light.  As proof just think about the big bang and the size of the universe.  If the universe expanded from a single point 13.7 billion years ago then how come the observable universe is 50 billion light years across (instead of half that size)?  NASA's Eagleworks are working on ways to possibly bend space using rings of massive amounts of energy around the ship and some tricks like oscillating the energy to bend space more efficiently.  The Washington Post published (link) images from a design concept for the ship, that might help capture the public interest. 

This is still all very theoretical but it is important to keep in mind that interstellar travel is still possible if humans decide to do it.  Slower than light interstellar designs like the Daedalus Project are built on solid well understood physics and engineering principles.  These faster than light designs are the next far reaching steps to add to our toolbox. 

Turing Test Finally Passed!

Here are two news links (here and here) to reporting the first artificial intelligence that successfully passed the Turing Test. 

First European Settlement in America...?

I saw this headline come in on Google News from Fox "News."

Read closer; ... no,  that is not a joke.  Fox "News" is under the impression that Jamestown was the first permanent European settlement.  ...I don't even know where to begin (America should refer to more than what is today the US, Jamestown is permanent, really?  How many families live there now?, etc.) but let me put a link to St. Augustine, Florida and leave it at that.