The microprocessor inside a computer is a single multipurpose chip that has revolutionised people’s life, allowing them to use one machine to surf the web, check emails and keep track of finances.
Now, researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, have pulled off the same feat for light in the quantum world by developing an optical chip that can process photons in an infinite number of ways.
“Hervé This, the father of molecular gastronomy, thinks the meals of the future should be constructed from chemical compounds.”
Is Bitcoin money? To its users the answer is probably yes, but to many people the answer is less clear. Alan Greenspan, for example, said in December 2013: “I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from. There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it’s a government or an individual.” Indeed, one of the things holding back the adoption of cybercurrencies such as Bitcoin is that they do not fit well with traditional ideas about money.
Answers to the question “what is money” have typically fallen into one of three camps. The first, known as metallism or bullionism, holds that money needs to be backed by precious metal. The second camp is chartalism (from the Latin charta for a record) which holds that coins and other money objects are just tokens, that the state agrees to accept as payment of things like taxes. Finally, there is the dominant, hands-off school of thought, which most mainstream economists would agree with, which says that money has no unique or special qualities, but instead is defined by its roles, e.g. a medium of exchange.
Bullionists and chartalists therefore emphasise a different aspect of money – the inherent value or the authorising stamp – while most economists treat it as an inert chip. But none of them seem to apply well to emerging cybercurrencies, which are not backed by precious metal or the state, and (at least at first) are not much use as a medium of exchange. So how do they become money? The answer to this question is that money has quantum properties which allow it to be booted up from the ether.
Quantum money
To see why money has quantum properties, consider for example a U.S. dollar bill. On the one hand, it is a physical object which can be owned, traded, and valued. On the other hand, it represents “1”, which is why it is emblazoned (in fifteen places) with that number. And numbers and things are as different as waves and particles. Numbers live in the abstract, virtual world of mathematics, while things live in the real world – and it is the tension between its two sides which give money its powerful but often paradoxical nature. Numbers are exact, while qualities such as perceived value depend on the person and the context. Numbers can grow without limits, while natural processes tend to be bounded. Numbers are universal, while objects can be owned, or become scarce. Numbers are hard and fixed, like the particle aspect of matter. Concepts or judgments such as worth or value are fuzzy, like the wave aspect of matter.
The trade of money objects for goods or labor in a market means that those things attain a numerical value as well, namely the price, by contagion, just as the atoms in iron spontaneously align in a magnetic field. Market prices are therefore an emergent property of the system, in the sense that they emerge from the use of money objects.
Money objects are unique in that their value is designed to be objectively fixed and stable. For other goods, their values are indeterminate until the moment they are exchanged for money (just as, according to quantum mechanics, the position or momentum of a particle is fundamentally undetermined until it is measured, at which point it “chooses” a value). This special status makes money objects desirable in themselves. It is often said that money is just a medium of exchange so need have no value itself; but by attaching numbers to money objects, in a kind of alchemy, we make them valuable.
The word “quantum” has been applied to all kinds of thing outside physics and is often misused to evoke a vague sense of spooky, non-mechanistic behavior. However the use of the term, and more generally the comparison with non-Newtonian physics, is constructive here for the following reasons:
(Finally, economics is often accused of physics envy – so why not go all the way!) By attaching numbers to our idea of value, in order to quantify it, the money system binds together two very different things, and it this fusion which gives rise to its complex behavior.
Emerging markets
Implicit to traditional theories is the idea that money has to be backed by some pre-existing quantity, be it real (e.g. metal) or virtual (e.g. the law of the state). It therefore inherits its value from outside. But from a quantum perspective, rather than money being backed by something of monetary value, it is the other way round – market value comes from the use of money. This has implications for the way we interpret phenomena such as cybercurrencies, and in particular helps to explain their ability to boot themselves up from nothing more than a set of rules and an internet connection.
As mentioned above, money objects are desirable in themselves – so the more something looks like money, the more valuable its numbers become, in a self-reinforcing dynamic. And just as market prices emerge from the use of money objects, so the money system expands with its markets. A cybercurrency is supported not by metal or the state, but by something much more distributed and amorphous – its network of users. A property of networks is that their power expands rapidly with size. The value of a cybercurrency therefore grows in the same way with the size of the network of users, so can initially be near-zero. It is therefore not necessary to begin with an external debt or a source of value, because the two can expand together. Numbers which were just numbers, can suddenly become worth a great deal.
When Satoshi Nakomoto mined the first bitcoins in January 2009, he (if it is a he) had to give them away to get people interested. They had numbers, but no value. In October of that year, users set up a web site quoting a price which corresponded to the cost of electricity required to mint a coin (about 0.0008 dollars per bitcoin). Once a price was available, people began to trade, but it remained a game – until May 2010 when a software engineer managed to buy two pizzas for 10,000 BTC, by posting a request on the Bitcoin forum. Someone accepted the bitcoins and ordered the pizzas using a credit card. Bitcoin was becoming money, and it never looked back.
One reason cybercurrencies have met with resistance, from economists such as Alan Greenspan but also the general public, is because they do not conform to our traditional ideas about money and value. When the first bitcoins were mined, they had neither inherent value, nor the power of an authority. Instead the two aspects – the real and the virtual – grew together, reinforcing each other as the number of users expanded. The problem is therefore not with cybercurrencies, but with theories of money which were shaped by previous monetary eras of gold standard or state fiat currencies.
Adapted from the full paper available at SSRN.
Gone are the days when you have to sacrifice size for speed with an SSD drive in your laptop. At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung just revealed a new 2.5-inch SSD drive with an incredible 16 terabytes of storage. It’s not only the world’s largest SSD—it’s actually now the world’s largest hard drive, period.
So how on Earth did Samsung pull off a such an incredible feat? Inside the PM1633a SSD you’ll find stacks and stacks of the company’s latest and greatest 256Gbit NAND flash dies, which are twice the capacity of the 128Gbit NAND flash dies currently in use. According to Ars Technica’s calculations, there should be somewhere around 480 to 500 of the dies inside Samsung’s new SSD. Which is even more impressive given it still fits inside a 2.5-inch housing, although it’s probably a lot taller than most.
The answer to the million dollar question about the new 16TB SSD—how much does it cost?—is thankfully not a million dollars. However, the first units will probably sell in the range of $5,000 to $7,000 and will be targeted for use in servers and other enterprise applications. But over time, as with all technology, the massive SSDs will certainly drop in price and trickle down to consumers—just in time for our storage demands spiking thanks to 4K movie downloads.
The decline of the thymus, responsible for the upkeep of our adaptive immune system, might be due to oxidative damage and insufficient antioxidant mechanisms to combat it.
For any computer, being able to manipulate information is essential, but for quantum computing, singling out one data location without influencing any of the surrounding locations is difficult. Now, a team of Penn State physicists has a method for addressing individual neutral atoms without changing surrounding atoms.
“There are a set of things that we have to have to do quantum computing,” said David S. Weiss, professor of physics. “We are trying to step down that list and meet the various criteria. Addressability is one step.”
Quantum computers are constructed and operate in completely different ways from the conventional digital computers used today. While conventional computers store information in bits, 1‘s and 0’s, quantum computers store information in qubits. Because of a strange aspect of quantum mechanics called superposition, a qubit can be in both its 0 and 1 state at the same time. The methods of encoding information onto neutral atoms, ions or Josephson junctions—electronic devices used in precise measurement, to create quantum computers—are currently the subject of much research. Along with superposition, quantum computers will also take advantage of the quantum mechanical phenomena of entanglement, which can create a mutually dependent group of qubits that must be considered as a whole rather than individually.
As great as computers are at crunching their way through millions of numbers in just a few seconds, they’re not well known for having deep emotions or a sense of humour — until now. A new artificial intelligence system developed by Microsoft has been trained to spot the funniest submissions to the ongoing New Yorker cartoon caption competition. Indeed, the software has been developed partly out of necessity, with so many entries flooding in that the human editors can’t cope.
“The process of looking at 5,000 caption entries a week usually destroys [my editorial assistant’s] mind in about two years, and then I get a new one,” the New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff explained to Bloomberg. “It’s a little bit daunting. It’s like going snow blind; you go humour blind.”
That’s why Mankoff has been working alongside Microsoft researchers Dafna Shahaf and Eric Horvitz in developing the new humour-sensitive AI software. Of course, the program needs to be trained in what’s funny and what isn’t, because it doesn’t have an innate sense of what makes something witty: by feeding in thousands of previous submissions, the AI gets a large database of previous responses to work from.
You may remember neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis — he built the brain-controlled exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup. What’s he working on now? Building ways for two minds (rats and monkeys, for now) to send messages brain to brain. Watch to the end for an experiment that, as he says, will go to “the limit of your imagination.”
Dropbox today announced that it has started to allow users to log in using USB keys as a universal second factor (U2F) of authentication.
U2F, a protocol promoted by the FIDO Alliance, isn’t the most trendy form of secure authentication for consumer web services. What’s far more common is two-factor authentication that you can sign on with by entering a code that’s sent to your phone. Dropbox already allows its users to do that, but now it’s gone further.
“After typing in your password, just insert your key into a USB port when you’re prompted, instead of typing in a six-digit code,” Dropbox’s Patrick Heim and Jay Patel wrote in a blog post today. “And unlike two-step with a phone, you’ll never have to worry about your battery going dead when you use a security key.”
It’s been nearly a decade since the earliest whispers suggested iRobot, makers of the Roomba, were building a lawn mower. But we seem to be a bit closer to the future we were promised: the FCC has granted approval to iRobot to build a hands-free mowing-bot, Reuters reports.
Although we don’t know all of the specifics, the mower, according to Reuters, would operate through stakes in the ground that wirelessly connect to a mower and map out where it should cut. That approach required a waiver from the Commission, which was granted despite objections from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The observatory argued the mower’s signal would interfere with telescopes, but the FCC sided with iRobot, saying its limitations would insure astronomers‘ work wasn’t harmed.
But a mower still doesn’t sound like it will be available to consumers imminently. According to Reuters, iRobot says the waiver will let it “continue exploring the viability of wideband, alongside other technologies, as part of a long-term product exploration effort in the lawn mowing category.”