Poetry and Quantum

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Obviously, I am riffing on Poets & Quants.

Let me open with an email we received from ACM Computing Surveys (2023 Impact Factor: 23.8, ranked 1/143 in Computer Science Theory & Methods) on our Quantum article.

Congratulations on the acceptance of your manuscript, “A Systematic Mapping Study on Quantum and Quantum-inspired Algorithms in Operations Research“.

I celebrated this at home on Friday with a chilled Hendrick’s Gin Martini, shaken not stirred, replacing olives with sliced cucumber.

On Sunday, it was a great pleasure to hear the first speaker – my first time at a poetry reading event – as the restart of International Poetry Forum, at a wonderful location, at City of Asylum, with a splendidly stirred Dirty Vodka Martini, with olives:

Terrance Hayes (born November 18, 1971) is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work.

A surprise was that he was accompanied by Padma Lakshmi.  It is the first time I have seen her in person, so that was an unexpected celebrity sighting.

During the Q&A following his reading, in one of his answers he brought up the use of volta in a sonnet, as an example of a form that is constraining yet makes the finished poem better, and then, spent considerable amount of time discussing his on-going difficulty in finding a satisfactory close to his (for over a year now) unfinished poem that he did read to us earlier, about twin siblings, one a person of action, who lives in the world and accomplishes impressive feats and is hailed as a hero, and the other, more of an introspective artist, who learns from the other twin’s sacrifices and so is able to effectively tell the heroic stories, but upon their deaths, that happen at the same time, the hero is buried within the village but the other far away in a forest…

So, I asked ChatGPT – after all this has been a Nobel week for ML/AI – to write a Sonnet with a Volta fusing Martinis, Quantum Computing and Operations Research from the perspective of a person who does not now see any contradiction in savoring two different types of Martinis!

The Dual Elixirs

A gin martini, shaken, cold, and bright,
With every jolt the flavors leap and twine—
Like quantum states that flicker out of sight,
Where mysteries unfold in tangled line.

A vodka martini, stirred with patient care,
Olives that rest, as numbers smooth and slow,
Through operations, clear and ever fair,
The ordered path where steady profits grow.

At first, I saw in each a different way—
In shaking chaos, in the stir was calm,
Two drinks, two worlds, forever in dismay,
Each pulling on my mind with different charm.

But now, I sip, and see the truth inside:
Both shaken, stirred, their joys are unified.

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