

The bomb-testing problem in quantum mechanics - neilc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur-Vaidman_bomb-testing_problem

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mattmaroon
I wish I were smart enough to understand that.

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curi
If you really want to understand, read the second chapter of this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-
Impl...](http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-
Implications/dp/014027541X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201139580&sr=8-1)

Just the second chapter isn't too long, and should help tremendously.

~~~
Leon
Quantum bomb testing is pretty cool. Considering you can become arbitrarily
close to probability 1 of detecting which are bombs, this is really cool.

The link at the bottom of the page also explored other areas at the end of
their essay, <http://nonlocal.com/quantum-d/v2/kbowden_03-15-97.html> like
computers 'bomb testing' humans, and alternatively 'bomb testing' computers
running calculations that are seeded with a random quantum generator. In this
way, it sounds like you could potentially run every possible input of a test
program (you are still limited to the number of computations from the
potential length of time you are testing that machine's quantum state), and
bomb testing different programs you could find which will complete in the time
tested on all inputs. Heck, if I'm reading/understanding that right it might
be possible to 'bomb test' a polynomial verifier on randomly chosen subsets
for linear time to the maximal input length and check if it
validates/completes, i.e. a summing of a randomly chosen subset of elements of
a larger set to see if they add to 0 in testing time the length it would take
to sum all elements ;)

Either that or, more likely, I'm totally confused by this quantum madness.
I'll have to ask my physicist friend :(

