Waterloo CS 467 First Impressions

CS 467 is Introduction to Quantum Information Processing, which I have with Michele Mosca. He has received many awards and written the textbook with other authors for the course. However, he is a very approachable professor. He gives detailed answers to questions during lecture and stays after class to answer questions. He makes the subject more approachable pointing out areas that he had trouble with when he started in the field, making sure we are better prepared to read papers in the area. With people like him doing research and teaching students, quantum computing will be ubiquitous in 15 years and Waterloo will be heading the effort.

Besides wanting to take the course for a long time, the course also cleared up assumptions I had:

• What makes quantum theory able to accommodate Schrödinger’s cat is the probabilistic representation of qubits, which isn’t magical at all in mathematical terms.
• Information can only travel as fast as light, as in the case of quantum teleportation where classical bits are sent to transfer qubits
• Unmeasured quantum states can change simultaneously, as in entanglement
• The secret ingredient to quantum computation: only measure what you need to know. As in the case of error correction codes, only measure the error