Computacion cuántica o bombo?

 Sankar Das Sarma, investigador en Física, director del CMTC (Condensed Matter Theory Center) de la Universidad de Maryland, publica en Technology Review un artículo enfriando las expectativas en computación cuántica

A decade and more ago, I was often asked when I thought a real quantum computer would be built. (It is interesting that I no longer face this question as quantum-computing hype has apparently convinced people that these systems already exist or are just around the corner).  My unequivocal answer was always that I do not know. Predicting the future of technology is impossible—it happens when it happens. One might try to draw an analogy with the past. It took the aviation industry more than 60 years to go from the Wright brothers to jumbo jets carrying hundreds of passengers thousands of miles. The immediate question is where quantum computing development, as it stands today, should be placed on that timeline. Is it with the Wright brothers in 1903? The first jet planes around 1940? Or maybe we’re still way back in the early 16^th century, with Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine? I do not know. Neither does anybody else.

Sobre el trabajo de Sarma, una lista de papeles en los que participa. 

Sobre el CMTC, y su trabajo, mencionando su colaboración con Microsoft.

Sobre el estado las investigaciones de la materia condensada (Condensed matter physics), en  Wikipedia.

La foto, tomada del blog de Microsoft sobre computacion cuantica.

Mary Poppendieck mirando en perspectiva

 En QCon Plus, una conferencia virtual de InfoQ, se presenta una conversación con Mary Poppendieck (en la charla también interviente Tom, su esposo y socio en su largo trabajo de consultoría). Mary presenta una visión de los cambios producidos en la construcción de software comenzando con el nuevo siglo: veinte años de cambios radicales que alteraron los paradigmas en que nos hemos basado por décadas. Me parece una visión en perspectiva de particular interés, considerando su propio trabajo en 3M iniciado con Six Sigma, y su propio entendimiento de los conceptos agiles. Mary habla de puentes; ella misma lo es, acompañando el cambio establecido.

Descaminados

 En Technology Review

On March 14, Shah and his University of Washington colleague Emily M. Bender, who studies computational linguistics and ethical issues in natural-language processing, published a paper that criticizes what they see as a rush to embrace language models for tasks they are not designed to address. In particular, they fear that using language models for search could lead to more misinformation and more polarized debate. 

“The Star Trek fantasy—where you have this all-knowing computer that you can ask questions and it just gives you the answer—is not what we can provide and not what we need,” says Bender, a coauthor on the paper that led Timnit Gebru to be forced out of Google, which had highlighted the dangers of large language models.