Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Public landing page: www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/course-listing/computer-science

Course lists: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ True to form, courses appear to have identifiers, e.g. qi for the Quantum Information course of the University of Oxford rather than more arbitrary A1/A2/A3, B1/B2/B3, naming convention used by the Mathematics course of the University of Oxford and the Physics course of the University of Oxford, and URLs can either have years or not:The "course materials" section of each course leads to courses.cs.ox.ac.uk/ which is paywalled by IP (accessible via Eduroam): TODO which system does it use? Some courses place their materials directly on "www.cs.ox.ac.uk", and when that is the case they are publicly accessible. So it is very much hit and miss. E.g. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/quantum/index.html from Quantum Processes and Computation course of the University of Oxford has the assignments such as www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/courses/qpc2022/assignment1.pdf publicly visible, but e.g. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/modelsofcomputation/ has nothing.

Handbook:

Project trying to compute BB(5) once and for all. Notably it has better presentation and organization than any other previous effort, and appears to have grouped everyone who cares about the topic as of the early 2020s.

Very cool initiative!

By 2023, they had basically decided every machine: discuss.bbchallenge.org/t/the-30-to-34-ctl-holdouts-from-bb-5/141

In June 2024 they felt that they had verified the result after a full Coq proof was published: So now onto BB(6) I guess.

2023: Jonathan Barrett

Output:With our understanding of the discrete Fourier transform we see clearly that:

We don't need to understand a super generalized version of tensor products to know what they mean in basic quantum computing!

Intuitively, taking a tensor product of two qubits simply means putting them together on the same quantum system/computer.

When we write the bra-ket notation: $|00⟩$ that is the same as $|0⟩\otimes |0⟩$.

The tensor product is called a "product" because it distributes over addition.

E.g. consider:

Intuitively, in this operation we just put a Hadamard gate qubit together with a second pure $|0⟩$ qubit.

And the outcome still has the second qubit as always 0, because we haven't made them interact.

The quantum state $\frac{|00⟩+|10⟩}{\sqrt{2}}$ is called a separable state, because it can be written as a single product of two different qubits. We have simply brought two qubits together, without making them interact.

If we then add a CNOT gate to make a Bell state:we can now see that the Bell state is non-separable: we've made the two qubits interact, and there is no way to write this state with a single tensor product. The qubits are fundamentally entangled.

2022 page: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/quantum/ (archive). Assignments are available:

2022 lecturer: Aleks Kissinger

The course would be better named ZX-calculus as it appears to be the only subject covered.

2022 page: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/qsoft/ Half of the problems are Jupyter Notebooks, not bad.

Like Quantum Processes and Computation course of the University of Oxford, also ZX-calculus-heavy.

www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/AndreiStarinets/sr_mt_2022.html (archive) contains 2022 problem sets and notes, well done Mr Andrei Starinets!

www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~barra/teaching.shtml As of 2023, contains some good 2015 materials: web.archive.org/web/20220525094139/http://www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~barra/teaching.shtml It was called "Subatomic physics" back then.

2015 professor: Alan J. Barr.

Possible 2022 professor: Guy Wilkinson (unconfirmed): www.chch.ox.ac.uk/staff/professor-guy-wilkinson

It is quite comical that two separate towns were founded one next to the other right in the middle of nowhere. And that both have so slightly weird names.

Ciro Santilli's favorite. A mixture of painting and book.

Bibliography:

The projects you do must always aim to achieving some novel result.

You don't have to necessarily reach it. But you must aim for it.

Novel result can be taken broadly.

E.g., a new tutorial that explains something in a way never done before is novel.

But there must be something to your project that has never been done before.

You can start by reproducing other's work.

In 1962 Brian Josephson published his inaugural paper predicting the effect as Section "Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling".

In 1963 Philip W. Anderson and John M. Rowell published their paper that first observed the effect as Section "Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling".

Some golden notes can be found at True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen page 224 and around. Philip W. Anderson commented:

As part of the course Anderson had introduced the concept of broken symmetry in superconductors. Josephson "was fascinated by the idea of broken symmetry, and wondered whether there could be any way of observing it experimentally."