John Pavlus

Dec 14, 2024 | wired.com | John Pavlus

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience. This rule acted like the key to a lock. If you had the key, you could unscramble the message; otherwise, you’d need to pick the lock. Some locks are so effective they can never be picked, even with infinite time and resources.

Dec 9, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Ben Brubaker |Susan D'Agostino |Max G. Levy |John Pavlus

Introduction How do you construct a perfect machine out of imperfect parts? That’s the central challenge for researchers building quantum computers. The trouble is that their elementary building blocks, called qubits, are exceedingly sensitive to disturbance from the outside world. Today’s prototype quantum computers are too error-prone to do anything useful. In the 1990s, researchers worked out the theoretical foundations for a way to overcome these errors, called quantum error correction.

Nov 25, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Max G. Levy |John Pavlus |Stephen Ornes |Ben Brubaker

Introduction No device is an island: Your daily computational needs depend on more than just the microprocessors inside your computer or phone. Our modern world relies on “distributed computing,” which shares the computational load among multiple different machines. The technique passes data back and forth in an elaborate choreography of digital bits — a dance that has shaped the internet’s past, present and likely future.

Nov 15, 2024 | flipboard.com | John Pavlus

3 hours agoPeople are quitting X, formerly Twitter, in droves, citing toxic rhetoric and the platform’s new terms of service as reasons for deleting the social media platform. One major reason to delete X that’s bad for your privacy is the Elon Musk-owned platform’s new terms of service, effective from today …

Nov 8, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Stephen Ornes |Ben Brubaker |Lakshmi Chandrasekaran |John Pavlus

In February 2023, Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Bard claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope had captured the first image of a planet outside our solar system. It hadn’t. When researchers from Purdue University asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT more than 500 programming questions, more than half of the responses were inaccurate.