Quantum Information and Quantum Of Information - I

Quantum Information and Quantum Of Information - I


Having returned from a number of plane, train and automobile trips and finally catching my breath, it's time to continue the journey:  Quantum Information

I will return to the concept of a Quantum of Information, but first, we need to introduce some other ideas.

Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense of the United States, made a statement that I will call, hereafter, Don's Dictum:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns.  That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know."

Contrary to what you might find in the popular and serious literature, based upon a survey, both of its scope, breadth and depth, you might think that Quantum Information Science is already all done and now all that we have are just variations on a theme. 

Let's get back with Don's Dictum and re-imagine this in terms of Quantum Information Science:

• There are the “known knowns”: Theories of information that have been developed over a long period of time such as Shannon, Kolmogorov, Solomonoff and the work of Chaitin and applied successfully to the context of Quantum systems.  I assume that the reader has followed the links and understands the basics here.
• Then there are the “known unknowns”: These are the cases where the context of application or adaptation of the known theories fail.  This is where the majority of literature and scientific research fits: that is, to probe the known unknown and to expand the horizon into "knowing".   For example, since much of information theory was original built on the foundations of classical thermodynamics, due to recent work we now know that this is approach breaks down at Quantum scale systems.  Here is where I will write about the exciting opportunities and approaches to solving some of the problems.
• Lastly, there are the “unknown unknowns”: Of course, by definition this category is where scientific imagination and empirical experiment can reveal something that causes a "leap" into a new and fundamental paradigmatic shift.   Obviously I don't have any examples!  However, I will address the possibilities to a strategy to explore this further.

In terms of the “known unknowns” and the relationship between entanglement and information implicit in the revision of the known theories based on the thermodynamics underlying classical information theories there is obviously an opportunity to explore ideas that might lead into the “unknown unknowns”.

For example, one are that I am myself working on is in the concept of "Minimum Interaction Distance".  This concept is related but orthogonal to the concept of "Minimum Message Length"  but rather than being descriptive by working through the definition of the observable state, the concept of "Minimum Interaction Distance" is based on the concept of the definitions of actions involved in the exchange of minimum information between states, for them to reach a fixed point or, dynamically, a limit cycle.

Of course, the concept of interactivity in terms of computation has been brought to light but I have yet to see an exposition on the concept of Minimum Interaction Distance.  There is the concept of the the Lieb-Robinson bounds but that applies to short range, and not to longer range correlations, nor to entanglements.

[I have to get back to this blog - so here it is - partially published - as I have to get to out to do some real work today!]

And here is the quick update, though more in the next posting!

For example, one piece of work I am following closely is the TORIDION project - we will have to see how real this is, but, I suspect that minimum interaction distance concepts will underlie whatever model of virtual quantum particles is used, as quoted here from the project:   "Most recently my attention is devoted primarily to the Toridion Project, a project to develop a working losses compression algorithm that is based on the interaction of virtual particles in a quasi quantum model. The project is currently in the advanced stages of development with working applications delivering around 85-99% lossless compression on a variety of data formats."

The main point about this is that the concepts of Quantum Information science have been, to date, driven by a hardware oriented paradigm or mindset but the innovations of the future will be driven non-linearly by a software oriented mindset (strongly, theoretically driven of course).

The question I want to leave you with is: What is a quantum virtual particle, or a quantum infon, or a quantum information or knowledge representation?

Well, that was it for this posting!  See my next post (when it is there).