ALWAYS IMPERFECT – Episode 2 – VIBE SLOGGING

Can a computer program a computer as well as a human being can? Artificial intelligence enabled a quantum leap in the quality of the tools programmer use to write code – but they’re delicate. Push them too hard and they break. Even when they work they can write reams of code that no human can make heads or tails of. John Allsopp joins us to investigate whether programmers will soon become obsolete – or whether they’ll kept around to clean up AI-generated messes. Is AI making the discipline of software engineering any better – or is that just a story we’re telling ourselves?

An attorney in California just got whacked with a USD $10,000 fine for submitting a briefing with hallucinations to a court.

Simon Willison’s most excellent blog is here.

Episode 2.09 Quantum Questions

In our world, you flip a coin and it comes up either heads or tails. But in the spooky quantum world – that’s everything from a single atom all the way up to a small virus – that coin can come up both heads _and_ tails, depending on how you read it. So which is it? Heads? Tails? Both? Neither?

Resonant Doubler
One of the experimental setups used to read qbits

Welcome to the strange world of quantum computing where this both-true-and-false ‘superposition’ allows quantum computers to vastly outperform their ‘classical’ peers (such as the one in your smartphone).

entangled qbits
A string of ‘entangled’ qbits

At least, that’s the theory.

Quantum computers are so unstable they tend to self-destruct before we can get them to run a program!

Claire Edmunds

Researchers Claire Edmunds and Virginia Frey from the University of Sydney’s Quantum Control Laboratory join us to explore this new quantum frontier: The deeper you go, the weirder it gets over the next billion seconds.

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If quantum computing fascinates you as much as it fascinates me, you may find these resources interesting:

IBM scientists explains quantum computing at 5 different levels (video good for beginners to experts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWJCfOvochA

IBM Institute for Business Value Report on Quantum Cybersecurity – what happens after quantum computing breaks all the encryption we use on the Web to keep our information secure and private?

https://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership/quantumsecurity/

Here’s a tutorial – in the very easy to learn Python programming language – that allows you to generate random numbers using a quantum computer.

http://dataespresso.com/en/2018/07/22/Tutorial-Generating-random-numbers-with-a-quantum-computer-Python/

And since you’re going to need a quantum computer to run this program, here’s the IBM Q Quantum Experience (5 qubit device available publicly on the cloud) – a REAL quantum computer you can run your own experiments on!

https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/experience