Quantum Searching In Your Browser

February 7, 2018 by Al Williams 17 Comments

If you’ve made it through the last two posts on quantum computing (QC), then you’ve seen the Quirk simulator, a little of IBM’s web-based offering, and how entanglement and superposition can do strange and possibly wonderful things. However, the superdense encoding I showed you didn’t really feel like a real computer algorithm. This time we will look at Grover’s algorithm which is often incorrectly billed as an “unstructured database search.” In reality, it is an algorithm for making a state — that is a set of qubits — match some desired state without simply setting the state.

By analogy, consider a web service where you guess a number. Most discussions of Grover’s algorithm will tell you that the service will only tell you if the number is correct or not. If the number was from 1 to 16, using traditional computing, you’d have to query the values one at a time to see which is correct. You might get lucky and hit the first time. Or it might take 16 times. With qubits you can get the same result in only four attempts. In fact, if you try more times, you might get the wrong answer. Of course, what you really get is an answer that is probably correct, because that how QC works.

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Mae Jemison And The Final Frontier

February 6, 2018 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

From the time Mae Jemison was a little girl, she was convinced that she would go to space. No one could tell her otherwise. She was sure that space travel would be as common as air travel by the time she was an adult. That prediction didn’t pan out, but that confidence combined with her intellect, curiosity, and the above-average encouragement of her parents drove Mae to do everything she wanted, including space travel.

Some people might become a doctor or a researcher, a dancer or an astronaut. But Mae became all of these things. Not everyone supported her non-traditional path—many people just pick a career and stick with it. Her path is impressive and through it all she gained a really interesting perspective on how education is approached, and what effects that approach has on society. After practicing medicine, joining a shuttle mission, appearing in Star Trek, and retiring from NASA, she became a voice for minority students and an advocate for integrating the arts and sciences in the standard curriculum.

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Black Holes And The Elusive Mystery That Lies Within An Equation

February 5, 2018 by Will Sweatman 83 Comments

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” This famous quote by Isaac Newton points to an axiom that lies at the heart of The Sciences — knowledge precedes knowledge.

What we know today is entirely based upon what we learned in the past. This general pattern is echoed throughout recorded history by the revelation of one scientific mystery leading to other mysteries… other more compounding questions. In the vast majority of cases these mysteries and other questions are sprung from the source of an experiment with an unexpected outcome sparking the question: “why the hell did it do that?” This leads to more experiments which creates even more questions and next thing you know we go from moving around on horse-drawn carriages to landing drones on Mars in a few generations.

The observant of you will have noticed that I preceded a statement above with “the vast majority of cases.” Apart from particle physics, almost all scientific discovery throughout recorded history has been made via experiment and observation. There are a few, however, that have been discovered hidden within the confines of an equation, only later to be confirmed with observation. One such discovery is the Black Hole, and how it was stumbled upon on a dusty chalkboard in the early 1900s will be the focal point of today’s article.

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What Are Those Hieroglyphics On Your Laptop Charger?

February 2, 2018 by Bob Baddeley 93 Comments

Look on the back of your laptop charger and you’ll find a mess of symbols and numbers. We’d bet you’ve looked at them before and gleaned little or no understanding from what they’re telling you.

These symbols are as complicated as the label on the tag of your shirt that have never taught you anything about doing laundry. They’re the marks of standardization and bureaucracy, and dozens of countries basking in the glow of money made from issuing certificates.

The switching power supply is the foundation of many household electronics — obviously not just laptops — and thus they’re a necessity worldwide. If you can make a power supply that’s certified in most countries, your market is enormous and you only have to make a single device, possibly with an interchangeable AC cord for different plug types. And of course, symbols that have meaning in just about any jurisdiction.

In short, these symbols tell you everything important about your power supply. Here’s what they mean.

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Mechanisms: The Screw Thread

February 1, 2018 by Dan Maloney 65 Comments

They hold together everything from the most delicate watch to the largest bridge. The world is literally kept from coming apart by screws and bolts, and yet we don’t often give a thought to these mechanisms. Part of that is probably because we’ve gotten so good at making them that they’re seen as cheap commodities, but the physics and engineering behind the screw thread is interesting stuff.

We all likely remember an early science lesson wherein the basic building blocks of all mechanisms laid out. The simple machines are mechanisms that use an applied force to do work, such as the inclined plane, the lever, and the pulley. For instance, an inclined plane, in the form of a splitting wedge, directs the force of blows against its flat face into a chunk of wood, forcing the wood apart.

Screw threads are another simple machine, and can be thought of as a long, gently sloped inclined plane wrapped around a cylinder. Cut a long right triangle out of paper, wrap it around a pencil starting at the big end, and the hypotenuse forms a helical ramp that looks just like a thread. Of course, for a screw thread to do any work, it has to project out more than the thickness of a piece of paper, and the shape of the projection determines the mechanical properties of the screw.

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Quantum Communications In Your Browser

January 31, 2018 by Al Williams 11 Comments

Quantum computing (QC) is a big topic, and last time I was only able to walk you through the construction of a few logic gates, but you have to start somewhere. If you haven’t read that part, you probably should, because you’ll need to understand the simulator I’m using and some basic concepts.

I like to get right into practice, but with this topic, there’s no avoiding some theory. But don’t despair. We’ll have a little science fiction story you can try by the end of this installment, where we manage to pack two bits of information into a single physical qubit. Last time I mentioned that qubits have 1 and 0 states and I hinted that they were really |1> and |0> states. Why create new names for the two normal binary states? Turns out there is more to the story.

What’s the Vector, Victor?

In Dirac notation, |1> is a vector. So is |hackaday> and |123>. You can get into a lot of math with these, but I’m going to try to avoid most of that. This is also called ket notation (the last part of the word bracket) so you’ll hear people say “one ket” or “hackaday ket.” Either way, the vector can represent one or more qubits and there are several ways to represent them.

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Global Resistor Shortage, Economics, And Consumer Behavior

January 31, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 78 Comments

The passive component industry — the manufacturers who make the boring but vital resistors, capacitors, and diodes found in every single electronic device — is on the cusp of a shortage. You’ll always be able to buy a 220 Ω, 0805 resistor, but instead of buying two for a penny like you can today, you may only get one in the very near future.

Yageo, one of the largest manufacturers of surface mount (SMD) resistors and multilayer ceramic capacitors, announced in December they were not taking new chip resistor orders. Yageo was cutting production of cheap chip resistors to focus on higher-margin niche-market components for automotive, IoT, and other industrial uses, as reported by Digitimes. Earlier this month, Yaego resumed taking orders for chip resistors, but with 15-20% higher quotes (article behind paywall, try clicking through via this Tweet).

As a result, there are rumors of runs on passive components at the Shenzhen electronics market, and several tweets from members of the electronics community have said the price of some components have doubled. Because every electronic device uses these ‘jellybean’ parts, a decrease in supply or increase in price means some products won’t ship on time, margins will be lower, or prices on the newest electronic gadget will increase.

The question remains: are we on the brink of a resistor shortage, and what are the implications of manufacturers that don’t have the parts they need?

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