I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and lives in Oxford). There was a brief description of quantum computing itself, which reminds me of the discussion we had a couple years ago under the heading, The laws of conditional probability are false (and the update here).

I don’t have anything new to say here; I’d just never heard of quantum computing before and it seemed relevant to our discussion. The uncertainty inherent in quantum computing seems closely related to Jouni’s idea of fully Bayesian computing, that uncertainty should be inherent in the computational structure rather than tacked on at the end.

P.S. No, I’m not working on July 4th! This post is two months old, we just have a long waiting list of blog entries.