This is not conspiracy but just how the world works. As ITER absorbs more money the overall public budget doesn't grow, and government is too inflexible to allow for private partnership (especially with, god forbid, a Canadian company).
No one, and I mean no one, expects the Polywell will escape the Ritter issues.
Except those who continue working on it. Cusp confinement has been theorized but to my knowledge never experimentally confirmed until these results came in. They may very well be overoptimistic with regards to having any chance in approaching thermalization in the center of their reactor, but given that they now have an experiment going with fairly decent confinement it seems warranted to establish to what extend Ritter's concern will haunt this design.
Plasma dynamics are very difficult to model and while Ritter's conjecture is plausible it nevertheless makes some assumptions that may not hold in the actual experiment.
You may call this hand waving, but the best way to establish this is an actual experiment. This, after all, is also the way that science works.
Too funny. So you really did not look at the paper. Arxiv is a pre-print archive. The notion that these nine authors spanning two companies, one European university, Los Alamos and the US Navy will not manage to get this published in a per-reviewed journal is rather cute.
With regards to the Polywell design you clearly either have not read this paper, or must think they made up their results.
As to General Fusion, they are hardly the only ones looking into magnetized target fusion (just the most ambitious ones) - so I fail to see how you comment even applies there.
Article states of the bat that it was a vacant UN sponsored school building. To spin this as the UN being complicit in hiding Hamas missiles displays some remarkably reading comprehension problems.
Maybe the UN should start sponsoring schools in the US. Obviously the education system failed you.
Look, as somebody who lives in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) I've followed this story very closely as soon as it broke. There needs to be corrections and consequences imposed by the provincial government.
This only happens when this story is kept in the forefront and MPs feel this is something their riding cares about.
It's really local politics 101. Presumably you are American and think your broken barely democratic system represents how things work anywhere in the world. Thankfully it doesn't.
And what believes and desires would that be, pray tell?
The death of this child touched many people here in the GTA, and trying to ensure he is not forgotten is nothing but a valiant attempt to ensure it doesn't happen again.
If you cannot relate to this, then search the Internet for your misplaced humanity. Maybe reading up on the case would help.
"I really don't feel too bad for those who let him starve and now want a monument."
What the F*** are you talking about. The ones who starved him are in jail.
The man sponsoring the monument simply does so because he feels the poor boy deserves to be remembered as a stark reminder that we have to try harder to prevent such abuse.
Anybody could have been this boy's Superman if only the neglect would have been detected earlier.
Yes, but you can distinguish quantum annealing behavior from regular thermal annealing. And when you compare the D-Wave device to simulations of both it conforms much closer to the former.
It's really not hard to find papers like this or this.
And yes, the Matthias Troyer who co-authored the first paper is the same guy who conducted the performance study that the/. blurb references.
That D-Wave performs quantum annealing can be regarded as settled. The only question that remains is how useful this may be.
Eight years ago everybody (myself included) thought D-Wave was a scam or just crazy. As new facts emerge smart people (such as Matthias) adjust their judgment.
Originally I meant to bet with Matthias Troyer if the D-Wave machine was truly a quantum annealer. At the time Matthias wrote me:
""Actually, we can't bet anymore since I know the results that we're going to publish and we'll say yes to quantum:-). We should have done the bet a year ago."
So we decided to bet if the current crop of D-Wave machines can already beat conventional computing.
It will be interesting to see how the next chip generation will fare, there is still lots of room for higher qubit integration. In comparison to conventional CMOS the D-Wave chip structures are huge.
Conventional chip design doesn't have lots of room at the bottom any more. D-Wave on the other hand still has plenty of room at the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
You are barking up the wrong tree.
Of course there is no conspiracy and I very much appreciate that Jeff Bezos invests into General Fusion.
What I find problematic is that ITER crowds out other fusion research due to its cost overuns. For instance there are now only 1 1 1/2 positions allocated to the Shiva star device (a machine GF could put to good use for plasma compression experiments). This is just enough money to prevent a mothballing of the machine, but not enough to actually get some research done.
This is not conspiracy but just how the world works. As ITER absorbs more money the overall public budget doesn't grow, and government is too inflexible to allow for private partnership (especially with, god forbid, a Canadian company).
No one, and I mean no one, expects the Polywell will escape the Ritter issues.
Except those who continue working on it. Cusp confinement has been theorized but to my knowledge never experimentally confirmed until these results came in. They may very well be overoptimistic with regards to having any chance in approaching thermalization in the center of their reactor, but given that they now have an experiment going with fairly decent confinement it seems warranted to establish to what extend Ritter's concern will haunt this design.
Plasma dynamics are very difficult to model and while Ritter's conjecture is plausible it nevertheless makes some assumptions that may not hold in the actual experiment.
You may call this hand waving, but the best way to establish this is an actual experiment. This, after all, is also the way that science works.
Too funny. So you really did not look at the paper. Arxiv is a pre-print archive. The notion that these nine authors spanning two companies, one European university, Los Alamos and the US Navy will not manage to get this published in a per-reviewed journal is rather cute.
With regards to the Polywell design you clearly either have not read this paper, or must think they made up their results.
As to General Fusion, they are hardly the only ones looking into magnetized target fusion (just the most ambitious ones) - so I fail to see how you comment even applies there.
Other interesting and scientifically sound approaches are limping along on pitiful drips of venture money e.g. General Fusion.
And while some public money goes into Polywell research, it's produced on a dime when compared to ITER.
Don't mean to knock the work that's done to advance the Tokamak design, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.
Saudi Arabia is a massive sponsor of ISIS.
The obsession of ISIS with killing Shias flows directly from the top.
http://agonist.org/how-saudi-a...
My comment was directed at the AC's phrasing:
"The UN got caught [theguardian.com] hiding Hamas missiles in one of the Gaza 'schools' they operate."
As to Hamas committing war crimes and terrorism, that's a dog bites man story, what's your point?
Article states of the bat that it was a vacant UN sponsored school building. To spin this as the UN being complicit in hiding Hamas missiles displays some remarkably reading comprehension problems.
Maybe the UN should start sponsoring schools in the
US. Obviously the education system failed you.
C'mon, the fact that this plane carried people from several nations who are completely uninvolved in the Ukraine mess is key here.
It's like bystanders getting killed in droves during a shootout with police. Changes the narrative.
Look, as somebody who lives in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) I've followed this story very closely as soon as it broke. There needs to be corrections and consequences imposed by the provincial government.
This only happens when this story is kept in the forefront and MPs feel this is something their riding cares about.
It's really local politics 101. Presumably you are American and think your broken barely democratic system represents how things work anywhere in the world. Thankfully it doesn't.
Yeah, right.
Obviously you have some problems grasping the concept that in a complex urban society is not only the (none-)care-givers that are involved.
This child's death could have been entirely avoidable if the system hadn't completely failed him.
This statue, as well as this faux controversy, helps to keep the story in the fore-front, and that is an entirely good thing.
The air they breath is indeed a waste of good oxygen. They are monstrous.
If psychology was good for anything it should have allowed to pick up on their depravity before children were placed in their care.
And what believes and desires would that be, pray tell?
The death of this child touched many people here in the GTA, and trying to ensure he is not forgotten is nothing but a valiant attempt to ensure it doesn't happen again.
If you cannot relate to this, then search the Internet for your misplaced humanity. Maybe reading up on the case would help.
Actually, this is exactly what they are doing now.
Anybody who would have detected the neglect could have become this boy's superhero.
The monument is to remind us here in Ontario that we have to try harder.
Social services, the school records, neighbors ... there are countless ways this tragedy could, and should have been prevented.
"I really don't feel too bad for those who let him starve and now want a monument."
What the F*** are you talking about. The ones who starved him are in jail.
The man sponsoring the monument simply does so because he feels the poor boy deserves to be remembered as a stark reminder that we have to try harder to prevent such abuse.
Anybody could have been this boy's Superman if only the neglect would have been detected earlier.
Yes, but you can distinguish quantum annealing behavior from regular thermal annealing. And when you compare the D-Wave device to simulations of both it conforms much closer to the former.
Also the extreme temperature sensitivity is more indicative of actual quantum annealing.
Simulated annealing on a non-digital chip?
I think you may want to think this over one more time.
Buddy, I have a physics degree too, so does Matthias Troyer and Geordie Rose.
Eight qubit entanglement has been demonstrated.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.3500...
.... maybe the slahdot stub should have had a link to hear from the horse's mouth?
In this interview Matthias Troyer puts his team's results into the correct context.
It is not gate based universal quantum computing but special purpose quantum annealing.
If you accept this as a valid approach to quantum computing has certainly been the subject of much debate.
Do you know how to use a search engine?
Are you aware of scholar.google.com?
It's really not hard to find papers like this or this.
And yes, the Matthias Troyer who co-authored the first paper is the same guy who conducted the performance study that the /. blurb references.
That D-Wave performs quantum annealing can be regarded as settled. The only question that remains is how useful this may be.
Eight years ago everybody (myself included) thought D-Wave was a scam or just crazy. As new facts emerge smart people (such as Matthias) adjust their judgment.
The machine is not faster than conventional machines at this point.
But Troyer et. al. actually confirmed that the D-Wave machine is performing quantum annealing as advertised.
In order to perform on the same level they used a highly optimized solver, not off-the-shelf optimizer software that the D-Wave machine outperforms handily.
Originally I meant to bet with Matthias Troyer if the D-Wave machine was truly a quantum annealer. At the time Matthias wrote me:
""Actually, we can't bet anymore since I know the results that we're going to publish and we'll say yes to quantum :-). We should have done the bet a year ago."
So we decided to bet if the current crop of D-Wave machines can already beat conventional computing.
Obviously I lost that bet, but not by much.
It will be interesting to see how the next chip generation will fare, there is still lots of room for higher qubit integration. In comparison to conventional CMOS the D-Wave chip structures are huge.
Conventional chip design doesn't have lots of room at the bottom any more. D-Wave on the other hand still has plenty of room at the bottom.
That's why I will continue to bet on them.