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Education Science

Quantum Computing for Dummies 60

Posted by michael from the next-big-thing dept.
Chillers writes "There seems to be a need for an undergraduate text on Quantum Computing. I've had a go at writing one, but in my opinion, it still needs work. The book is available available online (pdf) and any comments would be greatly appreciated."
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Quantum Computing for Dummies More

Quantum Computing for Dummies

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  • Slashdot post with link to a pdf via a DSL link? (Score:4, Informative)

    by malakai ( 136531 ) * on Monday January 24, 2005 @06:20PM (#11461602) Journal
    here, save this kid from being unable to use his DSL for the next 8 hours:

    http://home.swiftdsl.com.au.nyud.net:8090/~chiller s/TOQCv1_0.pdf [nyud.net] [Coral Link]

  • Please do my homework for me.
    • Oh come on. All he's asking for is constructive comments on how to improve it. I've just taken a look at the pdf and there had really a lot of serious effort already put into this, and putting it up for free... whooo, it can only be a labour of love. Plus there's a kick-ass Chapter 1 summarizing computational theory from Babbage & Ada through Turing up to when quantum mechanics come into the picture.

      Bearing in mind this is written as an armchair guide for the uninitiated (and should not be bogged down
      • Why thanks very much,

        We have a subsidised canteen at work, where you can get almost everything for around 2-4 bucks. You can get fish, burgers, salad, pies, pastries, etc. all manner of culinary delights! The food is not great, but it's more than acceptable. It's kind of like the standard you'd get at an independently owned burger store, or a little sandwich store. Anyway, nobody praises the food - all I hear is complaints about how it is crap. People forget (or ignore) that they only paid $2 for their b
  • He's about to get Slashdotted to hell... Let's get some more mirrors going. I would, but I'm banished to the land of 56k right now...
    • Take another look at that URL. That's not his personal machine, is one of those shared hosting machines that ISPs provide. Probably more susceptible to Slashdotting than most servers, but right now it's responding fine.
      • Since this wasn't posted on the "main" page, he might have a little bit of salvation here. Still, even with those that know to check different sections and are into "science" would still provide a huge load on any server. The PDF file comes in at about 2 Megs of data... not huge but enough to cause some problems if it is downloaded 1000+ times.
        • Still, most decent web servers can handle a load like that. Nowadays when you see a server brought down by the Slashdot effect, it's usually because there's an amateur running it.
    • Thanks for your concern, but SwiftDSL are not reporting any problems (I called them to make sure there would be no bandwidth problems).

  • Do I get college credit.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by elecngnr ( 843285 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @06:29PM (#11461712)

    is my first response after looking at the PDF.

    Seriously though, giving it a quick look, it seems that is it thorough. As I know something about Shannon and his work, I am interested to see what the implications of quantum computing are wrt channel capacity, entropy, and error correcting codes in general. I have a feeling that will take a more involved reading that I have time for at this moment.

    • Thorough indeed.

      I was looking at the math section and glad to find an introduction to unitarity, but I wonder if someone who needs an introduction to complex numbers, polynomials, matrices, etc., is going to be able to absorb quantum mechanics in the same read. However, since my mathematical background only covers the first n, where n < page_count, pages of that chapter, it's probably a good call not to make assumptions and start from the beginning. Besides many of us with mathematical backgrounds, like

      • Thanks, my math was a little rusty too and I had to revise. The idea was to have a 'self contained' volume, for people who don't like getting off the couch to consult other texts. Obviously it still needs work, this first attempt is more of a 'framework'.

        As for wikipaedia the entries on QC could do with a little 'dumbing down'.
    • Thanks, the chapter on Info. Theory needs work. I've heard some recent work has been done with quantum entropy which would suggest that von Neumann (and von Neumann entropy) is/was at least partially wrong.

  • Why don't you... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 24, 2005 @06:34PM (#11461760)
    ...upload it as a Wiki [wiki.org], and let the entire world take a crack at it?

    This process, akin to the open source development process, is how Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has accumulated so many factually accurate, well researched, and well written articles.

    • Wikibooks (Score:3, Interesting)

      by FleaPlus ( 6935 )
      There's actually a Wikipedia-related project called Wikibooks [wikibooks.org], dedicated to using the wiki process to collaboratively create textbooks. I think the OP's work would be an excellent contribution to this project.

      • Re:Wikibooks (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Teancum ( 67324 )
        I've actually written some stuff on Wikibooks. A book like this would be a huge win for Wikibooks, and I want to add my voice to suggest this approach.

        If not that, then at least look at Light and Matter by Benjamin Crowell [lightandmatter.com] This is an excellent undergraduate Physics textbook that is released under the GFDL. At the time he created the textbook, Wikibooks wasn't available, so he created his own infrastructure to get it going. Mr. Crowell is very approachable as well. If the author of this Quantum Computi
    • Good idea - I thought I'd let my fellow slashdotters have a look first and give me some comments before releasing it to a wider audience. It's hard to get people to actually proof read something like this, and I knew (hoped) that it'd get slammed constructively if I put it on /. first.

      So after scraping up the shards of my shattered ego I can fix all the issues and with help (hopefully) release v1.1 to something like Wiki.
  • Don't bother. Just mention somewhere that it is 250 pages.

    At that length I doubt most /.ers will actually read before commenting.

    --

    insert some trivial link here

    • You say this like it's a bad thing. The text is huge and in-depth; this topic wouldn't have any posts for quite a while if we all didn't post until we read it.

    • More Mirrors? Don't bother. Just mention somewhere that it is 250 pages. At that length I doubt most /.ers will actually read before commenting.

      Are you seriously suggesting that anyone would comment an article without reading it when it is 250 pages? I hope those lazy slashdotters would read at least 50 pages. (By the way, please let me introduce myself. I am new here.)

  • Acknowledgements (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Are you going to acknowledge all of us in the Preface of the completed work?

    "The author also acknowledges slashdot users 'CaptButtPlug', 'PsychoticPenguin', and 'SqlPrincess' for their comments on an earlier draft of this work."

  • Posted to Other Groups? (Score:3, Informative)

    by runningoutofnickname ( 852952 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @07:26PM (#11462413) Homepage
    Impressive!! Did you also post your request through Google Groups and perhaps some Yahoo! groups? I have found these groups to be excellent sources of advice and resources. For example, one reference was to http://www.rocketscientists.ca, which just happens to keep me within one click of most of the links I happen to like (including links to stories also posted here).

  • comments... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by s/nemisis ( 7175 )
    ok well i have to admit that i haven't read the entire text, but here is what i've noticed so far. you seem to be a little light on information across the entire book. lets take an example. You discuss how fo fine sin(x) in 3.4.1 which is fine, i would not have, its a bit trivial, but then when you were discussing complex numbers in 3.6, you didn't discuss the rather troublesome third quadrant, and show z* and e^i(pi) in like one line, right after a shaded box at the bottom of the page, asking for studen

    • Re:comments... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by s/nemisis ( 7175 )
      i read further and chapters 4 to 6 were very good giving history and lots of good information. and above i stated no example questions, that wasn't fully correct there are example questions, i meant more like .... review questions (question with answer but you have to arrive at it yourself). or like self test questions. I would like to see some complex or moderate questions placed in that test if you understand the concepts. i further didn't see shrodingers eq explicitly written. i didn't see probabil
      • I agree again. A textbook needs review questions. This I'd like to do, the trouble is that the answers need to be provided! In an email from Michael Nielsen [qinfo.org] (of QC and QI fame) he stated that he is bombarded with requests for answers to the review questions in his book (QC and QI). Coming up with questions, and answers is hard. It's time consuming and someone needs to check them thoroughly (so I'd need help). I'm sure there must be some mistakes in the grey boxes in the current text.

        As for your other poin
        • yeah the math review for shrodingers eq would be intense, but i think simply exposing the readers to it, and giving a nice qualatative explination of it and what implications there are due to it.
    • Agreed - rather than leaving out some of the easier parts of chapter 3 (as some people have suggested), more should go in. It was hard to know where to stop with stuff like complex numbers. It seems to me that the coverage of basics is still a bit superficial.

      My main incentive for doing this was that it hadn't (from what I'd seen) been done before. Coming from a Com Sci background myself I find it useful, even now, to have the elementary math close at hand to use as a reference.

  • Mirror of PDF (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Posted anonymously to prevent karma-whoring:

    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/TOQCv1_0.pdf [caltech.edu]
  • I have my doubts about this book. I just can't quite figure out what is the target audience here. First 100 pages or so (which is almost half) are dedicated to overview of elementary math and physics. I would certainly agree that it is necessary to reiterate through some fundametals like Turing Machine, but one that is unfamiliar with simlpe basics like eigenvalues or complex numbers should probably stay away from not obvious topics like quantum computing.

    I know you this issue is addressed in the introduc

    • Thanks for your thoughts, here are some responses:

      I have my doubts about this book. I just can't quite figure out what is the target audience here. First 100 pages or so (which is almost half) are dedicated to overview of elementary math and physics. I would certainly agree that it is necessary to reiterate through some fundametals like Turing Machine, but one that is unfamiliar with simlpe basics like eigenvalues or complex numbers should probably stay away from not obvious topics like quantum computing.

    • To stand up for Mr. Perry - he has a good point, which is that QC is very much at the intersection of theoretical computation and physics, and doing work in it requires a decent amount of knowledge in both areas (as a former QC research assistant at MIT, I can state this with some authority). I was a physics major with a decent background in computer science, and even so getting started in quantum computing research was a real bitch (this was back in '98/'99 - there were just very few "getting started" res
      • I can't even disagree with you. However, I just felt that the text was quite heavy on basic math. Your post is yet another reason to shift focus to physics way more, which should not necessary require going into heavy math. I believe Born used to say: "Mathematical formalism is a great help in describing complex things, but useless in understanding of real processes." (approximate quote) Once again, that's just my perception of approach to subject. My impression of math overload might even be wrong since I

  • Perhaps another introductory... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kiriwas ( 627289 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2005 @03:45AM (#11465798) Homepage
    A pair of professors at my university are also working on a very similar book. When I first saw this one on slashdot I thought someone may have tried to rip them off. Some of you may want to check out this one [ucf.edu] too. It looks as though it may be a bit more formal (with both notation and language tone).
    • Nah - no rip off.

      I like your link tho' - this text looks fantasic. Sigh... Now I have to read 274 pages! The similarity is a good thing. There is a need for a book like this as an introductory text. It seems that various people's work is covering pretty much the same ground, in fact this is the 2nd! book I've seen that is remarkably similar. Does this mean that people are getting it right in terms of informative books on QC for the lay audience?
  • Uploaded the file to:
    http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~stianbor/shared/TOQCv1_0. pdf [stud.ntnu.no]

    the university server should be able to take a slashdot or two.
  • I found this book really intersting, as I'm a MiT Computer Science student. Allthough I've taken courses in parts of what's described in the book (CS, information theory & math), it was interesting to see it from a different view. I will definitely recommend this paper to my fellow students.
  • In the Example-box the output should be 110 in stead of 100.
  • You might want to try selling print copies yourself on www.lulu.com. They have a print-on-demand service that works pretty well. (I've used it, but I am not affiliated with them in any way.) You can make your work available electronically, or in print, or both, and you can set the amount of royalty you want to charge. Lulu adds a 20% commission, plus a base cost that's a function of page count. You can design your own cover and upload that too.
  • ...we have a slash site called QubitNews [fis.ucm.es] which could use some of your comments. In fact, we talked about this book some days ago [fis.ucm.es]. Feel free to drop by and participate (get quonnected! [fis.ucm.es]).

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