Q-AHA: Quantum Algorithms, Hardware, Applications

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Archimedes had his Eureka! moment, and I had my Aha! when I found Stanford’s Q-FARM (Fundamentals, Architecture, Machines) website, a (somewhat forced?) play on their heritage:

Stanford University has been affectionately known as “The Farm” ever since it was established by founders Leland and Jane Stanford on their Palo Alto stock farm. The Stanfords’ founding grant decreed that “a farm for instruction in agriculture” should forever be maintained on university lands.

In a previous post, I have discussed Algorithms:

GAMA: A Quantum Inspired Classical Algorithm.

 The 2020 Tayur Prize emphasized Hardware:

Roll Over Turing.

I have also previously mentioned Applications:

Mathematics for Cancer Genomics: A Ridiculously Short Introduction.

In the Quantum Integer Programming Course, the students (both at CMU and at IIT-Madras) had to do an application-based project. I would like to highlight two applications from CMU students and three applications from IIT-M that I found really interesting:

Track Reconstruction. Cyclopeptides Detection.

Image Classification. Message Decoding. Quantum State Tomography.

I am always on the lookout for new applications in computational biology, and so I was happy to see the use of GAMA to speed up the detection of cyclopeptides from mass spectroscopy. Of course, Image Classification using GAMA is not only timely (“Does this X-ray of the lung show COVID19?”), it is also sexy as it is essentially:

    Quantum Machine Learning.

In my view, the only thing even more sexy (and I will plan for a separate post on this later this summer, hiding proprietary details, of course, so that the Hedge Fund with whom I am collaborating does not freak out!):

Quantum Finance.

You know I love physics, theory and applications: Track Reconstruction, Message Decoding, Quantum State Tomography. The field of Operations Research (OR) was pioneered by many physicists, notably:

Philip McCord Morse was an American physicist, administrator and pioneer of operations research (OR) in World War II. He is considered to be the father of operations research in the U.S. Philip Morse had a distinguished career in physics. Amongst his contributions to physics are the textbooks Quantum Mechanics (with Edward Condon), Methods of Theoretical Physics (with Herman Feshbach), Vibration and SoundTheoretical Acoustics, and Thermal Physics

Therefore, it is especially fulfilling to be maximally inverse to Morse😏: 

What can Operations Research do for Computational Physics?

Celebrating April, the national poetry month (25thAnniversary this year), here is T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 

Of course, I do not want to limit myself to physics and biology. Here is the formal announcement:

The 2021 Tayur Prize for Numerical Performance of GAMA-inspired methods for Important/Imaginative Applications.

The IIT-M students will have about a year to do the work and present their results. 

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