1 And the LORD looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
2 And the LORD said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
3 Make thee an ark, and this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred qubits, the breadth of it fifty qubits, and the height of it thirty qubits.
4 And Noah asked the LORD, What is a qubit?
5 And the LORD replied unto Noah, A qubit is a two-level quantum system, that may be found in either the state which thou shalt term 0 or the state which thou shalt term 1.
6 Or, verily, it may be found in any arbitrary linear superposition of those two states.
7 And Noah said unto the LORD, Oh, right. And what am I supposed to make these of, gopher wood?
8 The LORD replied, I hear trapped ions are good for this sort of thing.
9 And error correction shalt thou make in thine ark, placing it within a decoherence-free subspace.
10 And thou shalt take into thine ark all of the numbers, that you may make use of them for efficient finding of prime factors. And thou shalt–
11 Not all of the numbers, Noah interrupted the LORD.
12 And the LORD said unto Noah, What do you mean?
13 Well, Noah replied, if the ark is to be 300 by 50 by 30 qubits, then the maximum number to be stored within it must be no greater than 2450000.
14 While verily that is a large number, still it is finite. And thus it is not possible for the ark to contain all of the numbers.
15 That is even before we implement error correction, further reducing the number of available qubits.
16 And the LORD replied, I say unto thee, 2450000 is greater than 10135463, which is greater than the grains of sand in the desert, or stars in the sky.
17 Yea, verily, it is greater by far than the number of protons in the visible universe which I have made.
18 Is this not close enough to infinite for all practical purposes, thou ungrateful wretch?
19 And Noah replied, Yes, oh great LORD, it is a magnificiently large number. Verily.
20 But even so, must we be restricted solely to positive integers?
21 For truly, the number of reals is greater by far than the number of integers, to say nothing of 2450000. And then–
22 And the LORD said, Speak not to me of the square root of negative one, lest I become wroth with thee, and start smiting things.
23 But Noah spoke on, saying, How then shall we keep track of the phase of the wavefunction?
24 For is not the Schrödinger Equation explicitly complex?
25 And the LORD said, Look, this was obviously a terrible idea. Forget I said anything.
26 And Noah held his tongue. Though he did continue to wonder for many days afterwards, what use hath the LORD for a quantum computer?
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(A silly idea, inspired by yet more rain and flooding in New York, which lodged in my head and wouldn’t go away until I typed it out. Apologies to Peter Shor, Bill Cosby, and God.)
Yes, it needs to be done in this voice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bputeFGXEjA
Love the hat tip to Bill Cosby (hearkening back to when he was funny).
Wrong Ark. It’s was Moseses that was used as a communication device with
aliensG-d.What? No Ayn Rand?
Obviously. Things became just a bit too complex… 😉
That made my morning, and nearly made coffee come out my nose. Thanks Chad.
What, you went that far without bringing up the (set theoretic) independence of the Continuum Hypothesis and its bearing on the cardinality of the reals? And why not do QM with p-adics anyway? At least then you can get the abstract complex i in a constructive fashion, starting with the p-adic integers as a limit of finite fields. Sheeeesh, they are both a couple of morons. Noah should have pointed out that the grains of sand in HIS, ie. Noah’s, universe were not the grains of sand in some other guy’s.
Oh, my. That is most excellently well done, indeed.
in Hilbert Space, no one can hear you scream.