By the way, I am old enough to remember scientists in the 1970's forecasting a coming ice age based on what they thought to be incontrovertible science.
No, what you are old enough to remember is a media scare based on amplifying the predictions of a few scientific papers, and one that didn't even make sense given that most of the scientific papers coming out at that time predicted warming. The moral of this story is not that climate science is untrustworthy but that that you should not rely on the media for news about science.
I do not want to pay income tax, therefore, it is involuntary.
Sure, but that's irrelevant to my point that it is an abuse of the term "rob" to say that someone is asking to be "robbed" merely because they are asking to pay more in taxes in exchange for (theoretically) better government services.
I can't believe the amount of sheep who scream "rob me rob me yes please rob me some more!" in the name of raising taxes however whenever a tax hike is proposed, though. I guess I'm too old and too cynical now.
Given that the word "rob" implies that something is being taken involuntarily, referring to people voluntarily calling for themselves to pay more in taxes as asking themselves to be "robbed" doesn't imply that you are old and cynical so much as senile.
There's also a problem with Palestine entering the ICC (it can, because it will be a full-fledged state in the near-term). Then, the ICC would have jurisdiction to judge people in Israel and the US. And it doesn't bode well for America to openly support a country that will be accused soon enough of a few nasty crimes.
The ICC has no jurisdiction to judge people in Israel and the U.S. because they are not parties to the treaty founding it.
Indeed, that single quote in the context of the situation has told me enough about Skype to prevent me from even thinking about ever working there in the future.
Making it clear that you will screw over employees who will not stay with you indefinitely since you are out to "win" is not only a horrible attitude towards life, it isn't even a good way to attract "the best and the brightest people to build great products" because most such people get bored working on the same products for a few years and will want to move on to new challenges, so if you make it clear that anyone who decides to move on will be screwed over then you are basically saying, "If you are the best and brightest then don't work here because we don't want the likes of you!"
Just because Mr. Obama has become the President doesn't mean that he has stopped being an ordinary man, so it is not disrespectful in the slightest to call him by the same respectful title that one would use for any other ordinary man.
It's not like Mr. Obama has ascended to the realm of the gods (unlike a Gnomish Healer I once played, but that is a different story...); he is just another human being like the rest of us who unlike most of us happens to hold a particularly important position.
In the end it really doesn't matter whether the autopen counts as a signature or not because the Constitution has the following to say:
"If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law."
So even if the autopen didn't count as a formal signature, when ten days had passed and the bill was not returned to Congress with his objections it would have become law by default anyway, so in the worst case that would mean that the Patriot act was out of effect for ten days and then immediately resumed.
Indeed, most likely the sentence was correct in an earlier form and then he made a last-minute edit that introduced an error, as I have done on many occasions.
You misspelled "I". That's pretty good. I'd never before seen a one-letter word misspelled.
Presumably he figured that his time would be better spent battling the evil forces of spam then carefully proofreading his Slashdot comments, but I suppose that not all of us share the same priorities.
That is completely wrong...This is not philosophy, this is mathematics.
That is not an argument. Why is it completely wrong? And why is Richard Feynman incorrect for espousing it? And why is it so obvious from perception?
Sure, I will grant you that if you cut my explanation from a quote then it does sound like I did not make an argument.
The point is that although it is true that we need to interact with the system in order to measure it, it is not obvious that this should specifically cause the wave function to collapse. Thus, the explanation you gave is not sufficient to understand why the wave function collapses. By contrast, the No-Cloning theorem does provide a sufficient explanation.
Feynman was most likely giving an approximation of what was going on for the ears of non-physicists and so one should be wary about reading into it too literally.
Finally, I have never claimed that the No-Cloning theorem was the obvious explanation for wave function collapse; in truth, there is little that is immediately obvious about quantum mechanics.
The reason why measurement affects reality is because of the No-Cloning Theorem which dictates that quantum information cannot be copied, so the most that you can do is entangle yourself with the particle which creates the perception of a collapsing wave function.
This is as backwards as saying that "the amount of impedence of the individual components of an AC circuit is caused by the imaginary exponential." No, the imaginary exponential was devised to easily calculate the impedence. To pretend that the math makes reality is to put the cart before the horse. Quantum mechanics and the no-cloning theorem are concepts used for predicting reality. They are concepts of method. They do not create reality.
Sure, but the model you outlined with particles bouncing is also just a model of reality rather than being reality itself, so you can't claim that the problem with my explanation is that unlike you I invoke a model to explain what is happening.
I thought decoherence was the proposed resolution to the measurement->collapsing wave function approach of interpreting QM. Has this been derailed?
No, actually in retrospect I see now that quantum decoherance exactly corresponds to the model that I described, its just that it had never been explained clearly to me so I thought it was referring to something else. (Ironically the wikipedia article I just looked at now was in many ways clearer than the explanation I'd received in my classes, though in fairness it might just be that I have a few more years of experience under my belt so that it makes more sense to me now!)
Anyway, so in short you are absolutely right, and I appreciate you asking this question because it caused me to learn something.:-)
Alternatively, I've seen a proposal that QM is just a probability algorithm correlating various observables, as in http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412182
Hmm, interesting, I am not familiar with that result, but it might answer a question that is left-open by the many-world interpretation: why is it that the square of the amplitude of a component in the wave function corresponds to the probability of measuring it in that state?
Nonetheless, the fact remains that *I* as a subjective human being can do experiments to determine whether I am the only one who can collapse wave functions or whether other human beings do so as well. That is, this distinction does not require the assumption that a objective reality exists, only that I be able to distinguish between two different kinds of patterns that I perceive.
Furthermore, while it is technically true that there is no reason not to believe that I am a privileged being in this universe and so the rules apply different to me than to other entities, models where I do not make this assumption have historically tended to be better descriptions of my perceptions than those where I do make this assumption.
Every such experiment we have performed has shown that the wave function does in fact *not* collapse inside the box but rather splits.
You could also argue from this that the wave function of the apparatus inside the box is entangled with the particle it's measuring, and doesn't collapse until we open the box. That's what Schrodinger's thought experiment with the cat was about, right?
The key is that you can do experiments that tell you whether the state inside the box has collapsed or not without measuring the state itself, which is different from Schroedinger's thought experiment in which you do measure the state inside the box.
In fact, a variant of this principle is used in something called quantum error correction (which is one of the subfields in which I do research), where you can measure and correct error in an encoded quantum bit without ever measuring the bit itself.
Although Physicists like the Many Worlds interpretation, philosophers hate it. They all much prefer the Bohm interpretation, usually called a statistical interpretation of QM. Da Cog correctly describes this as a deterministic interpretation. The wave function represents what we know of the state of the QM system. Naturally it collapses if we know something new. Naturally, in a closed unmeasured system, it doesn't collapse. For philosophers this is a compelling interpretation. However, for physicists it is not compelling because it complicates the maths. So the choice, unless an experiment can be done to decide between them, is between an interpretation that is ontologically extravagant but mathematically elegant on the one hand, and an interpretation that is ontologically elegant but mathematically complex on the other.
That is a very good summary of the situation. Personally as a physicist I don't see the assumption of many worlds as being ontologically extravagant --- especially since there aren't really many worlds, there is just one quantum world that contains what *we* as classical creatures would consider to be multiple parallel realities --- but it does drive philosophers crazy.:-)
As for the apparently strange fact that observation affects reality - that is simply due to the fact that we must bounce particles off of something in order for us to measure it. To *see* electrons going through the double-slit experiment, we have to bounce photons off of them - and that interferes with the experiment, changing the result. It has nothing to do with us being "entangled observers" or having some "privileged reference frame".
That is completely wrong. The reason why measurement affects reality is because of the No-Cloning Theorem which dictates that quantum information cannot be copied, so the most that you can do is entangle yourself with the particle which creates the perception of a collapsing wave function. This is not philosophy, this is mathematics.
As a physicist, I believe that the many-world interpretation of quantum physics is the best because it is more practical than its competitors.
The first major competitor is the theory that the world is deterministic and its just our lack of knowledge that causes us to perceive a non-deterministic world. The problem with this is that we have no evidence in favor of this proposition and to the extent we have any evidence it is *against* this proposition.
The other major competitor is the theory that the wave function of the whole universe collapses every time we make a measurement. This agrees very well with experiment as long as the person asking the question is the one doing the measurement, but it has a major problem: since wave functions don't collapse unless measured, what counts as a measurement? For example, does collapse only happen when *I* make a measurement? If so, why should I be uniquely privileged? Alternatively, does collapse happen whenever some human being makes a measurement --- that is, if I perform the Schroedinger's cat experiment but with a person instead of a cat inside the box, then has the wave function collapsed even if I never open the box (assuming it is perfectly insulated)?
The advantage of the many-worlds interpretation is that it solves the problem of measurement by *not* treating measurement as being an special-case exception to the rules; it postulates that the wave function of the universe never actually collapses. Given this, how do we make sense of the fact we human beings *do* observe such a collapse? The answer actually appears right in the math: when we demand that a particle in a mix of states tell us which state it is in, it causes us to become entangled with the particle so that a *portion* of the universe splits into two states: one with the particle in the first state and us seeing it in the first state, one with the particle in the second state and us seeing it in the second state, and so on. So from the perspective of each of the observers the wave function has collapsed even though it never did. What happens then if you put an observer in a box and have him or her make a measurement? The answer also appears in the math: although the universe splits inside the box, it does not split outside the box.
This might seem fanciful, but it is something that we can actually test. Although we cannot put human beings in a box for ethical reasons, we can put increasingly large systems in the box that act as "observers" of some particle (by engineering an interaction between the observer and the particle) and then perform interference experiments to determine whether the wave function in the box has collapsed or not. Every such experiment we have performed has shown that the wave function does in fact *not* collapse inside the box but rather splits.
So what is the mathematical difference between being inside the portion of the universe that splits and being outside it? It is simple: if you are outside the portion that splits, then the wave function of the universe can be expressed as a tensor product between you and splitting portion. If you are inside the portion that splits, then this can never be the case.
Thus it turns out that measurement *already falls out of quantum mechanics* in a mathematically rigorous and observer-independent fashion, as long as we are willing to accept that a consequence of this is that from the view of someone external to the universe there is a (mathematically rigorous) sense in which there are multiple copies of you and I within the universe. Sure, if we don't like this consequence we can add a rule that gets rid of it by specifying that the wave-function collapses, but then you have to introduce some arbitrary rule that specified that some macroscopic bodies have the power to cause a collapse but not others. Now in fairness, there do turn out to be mathematically rigorous ways to do this and some of them even provide testable predictions so one of them might be proven correct one day, but there is
Would you please explain why you think that Prolog is powerful for DSL creation? This is an honest question, because the language fascinates me and I would like to experiment using it for a project one day, but I have never run into a situation where it looked to me like writing a program in Prolog would be easier than using some other language+library.
Yes, and for a post complaining about cheating I am mildly annoyed that he himself cheated his way around my "filter all posts made by editor kdawson" setting by submitting his story as a normal user and then getting another editor to post it.
Reading through the abstract, I see that a significant feature of this cryptosystem is that it cannot be solved by "strong Fourier sampling", which makes the situation more interesting because it is only a slight exaggeration to say that quantum Fourier transforms are the only trick we know of that lets us get exponential speed-ups in quantum algorithms.
It doesn't apply to this article. The way that one typically breaks a cryptosystem is not by reverse engineering (which is not even meaningful here, given that the algorithm is already completely open), but by finding a clever new way to solve the mathematics underlying the system using less information than the designers of the system had thought was needed.
It is worth noting that solving hidden subgroup problem is a subfield of quantum computing that has been active for a while. Although we can't figure out how to solve it in general, we can solve specific instances of it; for example, I think that factorizing is one such instance.
Thus, I suspect that we will eventually figure out a way to break this encryption. Even if we do, though, these mathematicians still get credit for giving us a new instance of the hidden subgroup problem to try and solve, which may give us additional insight into the extent to which the general problem can be solved by a quantum computer.
As a graduate student, who has just started learning how to write and submit papers, I have the following advice.
First, the submission process is a lot more open then I thought it would be; you create an author account, and then just submit the paper. Your paper then will largely be judged on its merit --- whether it is well written, well-explained, interesting, and brings a worthwhile new idea to the table. So in short, don't be scared off from publishing.:-)
Second, do a lot of background reading before hand so that you can figure out where your idea ties in to what has been done before. This is *very* important, because for your paper to be taken seriously you need to show that you have done your homework to learn what has been done before.
Third, keep in mind that most people who read your paper won't care about the details and will just want to figure out what the big takeaway idea is that they should learn --- the same that you yourself will often find yourself doing when perusing academic papers. So although you should endeavor to explain your ideas clearly and precisely enough that someone can implement your algorithm, you should also have a high-level description that explains the big-picture insight behind your idea.
Finally, part of what makes good papers is that they have a good "story" behind them. They start by talking about what has come before, leading up to the new idea that is being presented in the paper and how it follows from or intentionally diverges from previous work. They then talk about the intuition behind the idea itself to give the reader a high-level understanding of the insight behind it. (Note that this is where most people will stop reading, so you want to make the parts up to this good for their benefit.:-) ) Next they go into the technical details of their idea, in a way that is as pedagogical as possible; at every step they explain not only how something was done, but why it was done in that particular way. Finally, they describe how the idea works out well in practice, and then conclude by reminding the reader about what the significance of the idea is (because by this point if they actually read over the details they probably have forgotten:-) ), and end with an optional (brief) discussion about what future research questions are inspired by your idea.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, I am old enough to remember scientists in the 1970's forecasting a coming ice age based on what they thought to be incontrovertible science.
No, what you are old enough to remember is a media scare based on amplifying the predictions of a few scientific papers, and one that didn't even make sense given that most of the scientific papers coming out at that time predicted warming . The moral of this story is not that climate science is untrustworthy but that that you should not rely on the media for news about science.
I do not want to pay income tax, therefore, it is involuntary.
Sure, but that's irrelevant to my point that it is an abuse of the term "rob" to say that someone is asking to be "robbed" merely because they are asking to pay more in taxes in exchange for (theoretically) better government services.
I can't believe the amount of sheep who scream "rob me rob me yes please rob me some more!" in the name of raising taxes however whenever a tax hike is proposed, though. I guess I'm too old and too cynical now.
Given that the word "rob" implies that something is being taken involuntarily, referring to people voluntarily calling for themselves to pay more in taxes as asking themselves to be "robbed" doesn't imply that you are old and cynical so much as senile.
There's also a problem with Palestine entering the ICC (it can, because it will be a full-fledged state in the near-term). Then, the ICC would have jurisdiction to judge people in Israel and the US. And it doesn't bode well for America to openly support a country that will be accused soon enough of a few nasty crimes.
The ICC has no jurisdiction to judge people in Israel and the U.S. because they are not parties to the treaty founding it.
Indeed, that single quote in the context of the situation has told me enough about Skype to prevent me from even thinking about ever working there in the future.
Making it clear that you will screw over employees who will not stay with you indefinitely since you are out to "win" is not only a horrible attitude towards life, it isn't even a good way to attract "the best and the brightest people to build great products" because most such people get bored working on the same products for a few years and will want to move on to new challenges, so if you make it clear that anyone who decides to move on will be screwed over then you are basically saying, "If you are the best and brightest then don't work here because we don't want the likes of you!"
Just because Mr. Obama has become the President doesn't mean that he has stopped being an ordinary man, so it is not disrespectful in the slightest to call him by the same respectful title that one would use for any other ordinary man.
It's not like Mr. Obama has ascended to the realm of the gods (unlike a Gnomish Healer I once played, but that is a different story...); he is just another human being like the rest of us who unlike most of us happens to hold a particularly important position.
In the end it really doesn't matter whether the autopen counts as a signature or not because the Constitution has the following to say:
"If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law."
So even if the autopen didn't count as a formal signature, when ten days had passed and the bill was not returned to Congress with his objections it would have become law by default anyway, so in the worst case that would mean that the Patriot act was out of effect for ten days and then immediately resumed.
Indeed, most likely the sentence was correct in an earlier form and then he made a last-minute edit that introduced an error, as I have done on many occasions.
You misspelled "I". That's pretty good. I'd never before seen a one-letter word misspelled.
Presumably he figured that his time would be better spent battling the evil forces of spam then carefully proofreading his Slashdot comments, but I suppose that not all of us share the same priorities.
That is completely wrong...This is not philosophy, this is mathematics.
That is not an argument. Why is it completely wrong? And why is Richard Feynman incorrect for espousing it? And why is it so obvious from perception?
Sure, I will grant you that if you cut my explanation from a quote then it does sound like I did not make an argument.
The point is that although it is true that we need to interact with the system in order to measure it, it is not obvious that this should specifically cause the wave function to collapse. Thus, the explanation you gave is not sufficient to understand why the wave function collapses. By contrast, the No-Cloning theorem does provide a sufficient explanation.
Feynman was most likely giving an approximation of what was going on for the ears of non-physicists and so one should be wary about reading into it too literally.
Finally, I have never claimed that the No-Cloning theorem was the obvious explanation for wave function collapse; in truth, there is little that is immediately obvious about quantum mechanics.
The reason why measurement affects reality is because of the No-Cloning Theorem which dictates that quantum information cannot be copied, so the most that you can do is entangle yourself with the particle which creates the perception of a collapsing wave function.
This is as backwards as saying that "the amount of impedence of the individual components of an AC circuit is caused by the imaginary exponential." No, the imaginary exponential was devised to easily calculate the impedence. To pretend that the math makes reality is to put the cart before the horse. Quantum mechanics and the no-cloning theorem are concepts used for predicting reality. They are concepts of method. They do not create reality.
Sure, but the model you outlined with particles bouncing is also just a model of reality rather than being reality itself, so you can't claim that the problem with my explanation is that unlike you I invoke a model to explain what is happening.
I thought decoherence was the proposed resolution to the measurement->collapsing wave function approach of interpreting QM. Has this been derailed?
No, actually in retrospect I see now that quantum decoherance exactly corresponds to the model that I described, its just that it had never been explained clearly to me so I thought it was referring to something else. (Ironically the wikipedia article I just looked at now was in many ways clearer than the explanation I'd received in my classes, though in fairness it might just be that I have a few more years of experience under my belt so that it makes more sense to me now!)
Anyway, so in short you are absolutely right, and I appreciate you asking this question because it caused me to learn something. :-)
Alternatively, I've seen a proposal that QM is just a probability algorithm correlating various observables, as in http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412182
Hmm, interesting, I am not familiar with that result, but it might answer a question that is left-open by the many-world interpretation: why is it that the square of the amplitude of a component in the wave function corresponds to the probability of measuring it in that state?
Nonetheless, the fact remains that *I* as a subjective human being can do experiments to determine whether I am the only one who can collapse wave functions or whether other human beings do so as well. That is, this distinction does not require the assumption that a objective reality exists, only that I be able to distinguish between two different kinds of patterns that I perceive.
Furthermore, while it is technically true that there is no reason not to believe that I am a privileged being in this universe and so the rules apply different to me than to other entities, models where I do not make this assumption have historically tended to be better descriptions of my perceptions than those where I do make this assumption.
Every such experiment we have performed has shown that the wave function does in fact *not* collapse inside the box but rather splits.
You could also argue from this that the wave function of the apparatus inside the box is entangled with the particle it's measuring, and doesn't collapse until we open the box. That's what Schrodinger's thought experiment with the cat was about, right?
The key is that you can do experiments that tell you whether the state inside the box has collapsed or not without measuring the state itself, which is different from Schroedinger's thought experiment in which you do measure the state inside the box.
In fact, a variant of this principle is used in something called quantum error correction (which is one of the subfields in which I do research), where you can measure and correct error in an encoded quantum bit without ever measuring the bit itself.
Although Physicists like the Many Worlds interpretation, philosophers hate it. They all much prefer the Bohm interpretation, usually called a statistical interpretation of QM. Da Cog correctly describes this as a deterministic interpretation. The wave function represents what we know of the state of the QM system. Naturally it collapses if we know something new. Naturally, in a closed unmeasured system, it doesn't collapse. For philosophers this is a compelling interpretation. However, for physicists it is not compelling because it complicates the maths. So the choice, unless an experiment can be done to decide between them, is between an interpretation that is ontologically extravagant but mathematically elegant on the one hand, and an interpretation that is ontologically elegant but mathematically complex on the other.
That is a very good summary of the situation. Personally as a physicist I don't see the assumption of many worlds as being ontologically extravagant --- especially since there aren't really many worlds, there is just one quantum world that contains what *we* as classical creatures would consider to be multiple parallel realities --- but it does drive philosophers crazy. :-)
I wish I had one for you, but unfortunately I don't read physics books for laypeople any more so I don't know whats out there.
As for the apparently strange fact that observation affects reality - that is simply due to the fact that we must bounce particles off of something in order for us to measure it. To *see* electrons going through the double-slit experiment, we have to bounce photons off of them - and that interferes with the experiment, changing the result. It has nothing to do with us being "entangled observers" or having some "privileged reference frame".
That is completely wrong. The reason why measurement affects reality is because of the No-Cloning Theorem which dictates that quantum information cannot be copied, so the most that you can do is entangle yourself with the particle which creates the perception of a collapsing wave function. This is not philosophy, this is mathematics.
As a physicist, I believe that the many-world interpretation of quantum physics is the best because it is more practical than its competitors.
The first major competitor is the theory that the world is deterministic and its just our lack of knowledge that causes us to perceive a non-deterministic world. The problem with this is that we have no evidence in favor of this proposition and to the extent we have any evidence it is *against* this proposition.
The other major competitor is the theory that the wave function of the whole universe collapses every time we make a measurement. This agrees very well with experiment as long as the person asking the question is the one doing the measurement, but it has a major problem: since wave functions don't collapse unless measured, what counts as a measurement? For example, does collapse only happen when *I* make a measurement? If so, why should I be uniquely privileged? Alternatively, does collapse happen whenever some human being makes a measurement --- that is, if I perform the Schroedinger's cat experiment but with a person instead of a cat inside the box, then has the wave function collapsed even if I never open the box (assuming it is perfectly insulated)?
The advantage of the many-worlds interpretation is that it solves the problem of measurement by *not* treating measurement as being an special-case exception to the rules; it postulates that the wave function of the universe never actually collapses. Given this, how do we make sense of the fact we human beings *do* observe such a collapse? The answer actually appears right in the math: when we demand that a particle in a mix of states tell us which state it is in, it causes us to become entangled with the particle so that a *portion* of the universe splits into two states: one with the particle in the first state and us seeing it in the first state, one with the particle in the second state and us seeing it in the second state, and so on. So from the perspective of each of the observers the wave function has collapsed even though it never did. What happens then if you put an observer in a box and have him or her make a measurement? The answer also appears in the math: although the universe splits inside the box, it does not split outside the box.
This might seem fanciful, but it is something that we can actually test. Although we cannot put human beings in a box for ethical reasons, we can put increasingly large systems in the box that act as "observers" of some particle (by engineering an interaction between the observer and the particle) and then perform interference experiments to determine whether the wave function in the box has collapsed or not. Every such experiment we have performed has shown that the wave function does in fact *not* collapse inside the box but rather splits.
So what is the mathematical difference between being inside the portion of the universe that splits and being outside it? It is simple: if you are outside the portion that splits, then the wave function of the universe can be expressed as a tensor product between you and splitting portion. If you are inside the portion that splits, then this can never be the case.
Thus it turns out that measurement *already falls out of quantum mechanics* in a mathematically rigorous and observer-independent fashion, as long as we are willing to accept that a consequence of this is that from the view of someone external to the universe there is a (mathematically rigorous) sense in which there are multiple copies of you and I within the universe. Sure, if we don't like this consequence we can add a rule that gets rid of it by specifying that the wave-function collapses, but then you have to introduce some arbitrary rule that specified that some macroscopic bodies have the power to cause a collapse but not others. Now in fairness, there do turn out to be mathematically rigorous ways to do this and some of them even provide testable predictions so one of them might be proven correct one day, but there is
Would you please explain why you think that Prolog is powerful for DSL creation? This is an honest question, because the language fascinates me and I would like to experiment using it for a project one day, but I have never run into a situation where it looked to me like writing a program in Prolog would be easier than using some other language+library.
Yes, and for a post complaining about cheating I am mildly annoyed that he himself cheated his way around my "filter all posts made by editor kdawson" setting by submitting his story as a normal user and then getting another editor to post it.
Qt is working on modularizing itself. So you could just not compile the bits you don't want.
Dear lord, it has already become alive and self-modifying? Someone shut it down before it's too late!
Here is a link to the paper on the arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.2390
Reading through the abstract, I see that a significant feature of this cryptosystem is that it cannot be solved by "strong Fourier sampling", which makes the situation more interesting because it is only a slight exaggeration to say that quantum Fourier transforms are the only trick we know of that lets us get exponential speed-ups in quantum algorithms.
It doesn't apply to this article. The way that one typically breaks a cryptosystem is not by reverse engineering (which is not even meaningful here, given that the algorithm is already completely open), but by finding a clever new way to solve the mathematics underlying the system using less information than the designers of the system had thought was needed.
It is worth noting that solving hidden subgroup problem is a subfield of quantum computing that has been active for a while. Although we can't figure out how to solve it in general, we can solve specific instances of it; for example, I think that factorizing is one such instance.
Thus, I suspect that we will eventually figure out a way to break this encryption. Even if we do, though, these mathematicians still get credit for giving us a new instance of the hidden subgroup problem to try and solve, which may give us additional insight into the extent to which the general problem can be solved by a quantum computer.
As a graduate student, who has just started learning how to write and submit papers, I have the following advice.
First, the submission process is a lot more open then I thought it would be; you create an author account, and then just submit the paper. Your paper then will largely be judged on its merit --- whether it is well written, well-explained, interesting, and brings a worthwhile new idea to the table. So in short, don't be scared off from publishing. :-)
Second, do a lot of background reading before hand so that you can figure out where your idea ties in to what has been done before. This is *very* important, because for your paper to be taken seriously you need to show that you have done your homework to learn what has been done before.
Third, keep in mind that most people who read your paper won't care about the details and will just want to figure out what the big takeaway idea is that they should learn --- the same that you yourself will often find yourself doing when perusing academic papers. So although you should endeavor to explain your ideas clearly and precisely enough that someone can implement your algorithm, you should also have a high-level description that explains the big-picture insight behind your idea.
Finally, part of what makes good papers is that they have a good "story" behind them. They start by talking about what has come before, leading up to the new idea that is being presented in the paper and how it follows from or intentionally diverges from previous work. They then talk about the intuition behind the idea itself to give the reader a high-level understanding of the insight behind it. (Note that this is where most people will stop reading, so you want to make the parts up to this good for their benefit. :-) ) Next they go into the technical details of their idea, in a way that is as pedagogical as possible; at every step they explain not only how something was done, but why it was done in that particular way. Finally, they describe how the idea works out well in practice, and then conclude by reminding the reader about what the significance of the idea is (because by this point if they actually read over the details they probably have forgotten :-) ), and end with an optional (brief) discussion about what future research questions are inspired by your idea.
Good luck, and most importantly --- have fun! :-)
Indeed, it's not like they've posted information on the fact that they intend to model nuclear weapons in plain sight on the internet as one of their three missions.