Neil Gershenfeld
speaker
1,202 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2023
last heard May 2023
Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And there was a problem of how you can sense multiple objects at the same time.
And so I was studying how you can remotely sense materials to make low-cost tags that could let you distinguish multiple objects simultaneously.
To do that, you need non-linearity so that the signal is modulated and
And so I was looking for material sources of nonlinearity and that led me to look at how nuclear spins interact, just for spin resonance, the sort of things you use when you like go in an MRI machine.
And so I was studying how to use that.
And it turns out that it was a bad idea.
You couldn't remotely use it for shoplifting tags.
but I realized you could compute.
And so with a group of colleagues thinking about early quantum computing, like David DiVincenzo and Charlie Bennett was articulating, what are the properties you need to compute?
And then looking at how to make the tags, it turns out the tags were a terrible idea for sensing
objects in a supermarket checkout, but I realized they were computing.
With Ike Chuang and a few other people, we realized we could program nuclear spins to compute.
That's what we used to do Grover's search algorithm, and then it was used for Shor's factoring algorithm.
The systems we did it in nuclear magnetic resonance don't scale beyond a few qubits.
But the techniques have lived on.
And so, you know, all the current quantum computing techniques grew out of the ways we would talk to these spins.
But I'm telling this whole story because it came from a bad way to make a shoplifting tag.
Yeah.
I wouldn't call it guts.
I would call it collaboration.
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