Imagine you’re a developer and you have some code you’d like to run on a quantum computer. And imagine there’s a quantum computer maker who says you can run your code. But you can’t trust each other — you, the developer, don’t want the computer maker to rip off your great code, and the computer builder doesn’t want you to peep its breakthrough machine. This new system can satisfy both of you.

Stefanie Barz and colleagues at the University of Vienna’s Center for Quantum Science and Technology prepared an experimental demonstration of a blind computing technique, and tested it with two well-known quantum computing algorithms.

Here’s how it would work: You, the developer, prepare some quantum bits, in this case photons that have a polarity (vertical or horizontal) known only to you. Then you would send these to the remote quantum server. The computer would entangle the qubits with even more qubits, using a quantum entangling gate — but the computer wouldn’t know the nature of the entangled states, just that they are in fact entangled. The server is “blind” to the entanglement state, and anyone tapping into the server would be blind, too.

Imagine the computer tries to snoop on the qubits and see their entanglement, which could then be used to extract the information they carry. You’d be able to tell, because of the laws of quantum mechanics. The cat is both dead and alive until you check whether it’s dead or alive, and then it’s one or the other. If your photon has a specific state, you’d be able to tell that it was spied upon.

Back to the entangled bits. The actual information processing takes place via a sequence of measurements on your qubits. These measurements would be directed by you, based on the particular states of each qubit (which, again, only you know). The quantum server would run the measurements and report the results to you. This is called measurement-based quantum computation. Then you’d be able to interpret the results, based on your knowledge of the qubits’ initial states. To the computer — or any interceptor — the whole thing would look utterly random.

Since you know the entangled state on which the measurements were made, you can be certain whether the server really was a quantum computer. And you wouldn’t have to disclose your algorithm, the input or even the output — it’s perfectly secure, the researchers write in their paper, published online today in Science.

Blind quantum computation is more secure than classical blind computation, which relies on tactics like the backward factoring of prime numbers, said Vlatko Vedral, a researcher at the University of Oxford who wrote a Perspective piece explaining this finding.

“The double blindness is guaranteed by the laws of quantum physics, instead of the assumed difficulty of of computational tasks as in classical physics,” Vedral writes.

The Vienna team argues their simulation is a potentially useful technique for future cloud-based quantum computing networks.

“Our experiment is a step toward unconditionally secure quantum computing in a client-server environment where the client’s entire computation remains hidden, a functionality not known to be achievable in the classical world,” they write.

The teaser video (below) doesn’t offer a ton of information about the computer, but does show off a widget hub in the corner of the desk you can use to launch applications on the screen, and the ability to pull down a timeline populated with news information, tweets, or other alerts from the top corner of the table. Both the widgets and the timeline can be casually swiped away when you’re done with them, and the screen and location of the widgets can be customized to meet your own personal needs. The ExoPC also supports full-screen applications, showing off in the video an app that instantly turns the computer into an electronic piano.

Multi-touch desk computers aren’t really anything new. Samsung for instance recently announced the Samsung SUR40, a 40-inch, 1080p multitouch table running Microsoft’s Surface software. Where the ExoPC stands out, however, is in its price tag. While the SUR40 and other table computers are designed for businesses (and priced that way, the SUR40 is US$8,400!), the ExoPC is instead priced at a modest $1,299 making it affordable for average consumers.

The Samsung SUR40 is expected to be a computer replacement, however, the ExoPC also appears to be something you would use as a replacement for a traditional desk, and a supplement for your actual computer.

A Japanese supercomputer is now the world’s fastest, unseating the previous record-holder by nearly a factor of four. The K Computer, based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, can perform 8 petaflops — that’s 8 quadrillion calculations per second.

The next-best computer is China’s Tianhe-1A , which set a record at 2.6 petaflops last fall. The U.S.-based Jaguar computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is now in third place with 1.75 petaflops.

K Computer topped the newest TOP500 List of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg.

K Computer, built by Fujitsu and entirely made in Japan, has 672 racks equipped with a current total of 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores. It will eventually have 800 racks and will be capable of performing 10 petaflops, according to a news release from RIKEN. RIKEN and Fujitsu plan to have the computer fully operational by November 2012.

At least two American 10-petaflop machines are set to come online next year — IBM is building Mira, based at Argonne National Laboratory, and Blue Waters, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a 20-petaflop IBM model called Sequoia.

K computer will be used for global climate research, meteorology, disaster prevention, and medicine, according to RIKEN.

This is a Teleportation Device The setup Noriyuki Lee and colleagues used to teleport quantum light

In a real-life use of Schrödinger’s theoretical paradoxical cat, researchers report that they were able to quickly transfer a complex set of quantum information while preserving its integrity. The information, in the form of light, was manipulated in such a way that it existed in two states at the same time, and it was destroyed in one spot and recreated in another. The new breakthrough is a major step toward building safe, effective quantum computers.

No felines were harmed in the making of this experiment, which actually studied wave packets of light that existed in a state of quantum superposition, meaning they existed in two different phases simultaneously. This phenomenon is described in Erwin Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics thought experiment, in which a cat is simultaneously dead and alive, depending on the state of a subatomic particle.

In this experiment, researchers in Australia and Japan were able to transfer quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, “alive” again and unchanged. This is a major advance, as previous teleportation experiments were either very slow or caused some information to be lost.

The team employed a mind-boggling set of quantum manipulation techniques to achieve this, including squeezing, photon subtraction, entanglement and homodyne detection. The photo above depicts their device, nicknamed the Teleporter, in the lab of Akira Furusawa at the University of Tokyo.

The results pave the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of information, according to Elanor Huntington, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who was part of the study.

“If we can do this, we can do just about any form of communication needed for any quantum technology,” she said in a news release.

Instead of using ones and zeroes, quantum computers store data as qubits, which can represent one and zero simultaneously. This superposition enables the computers to solve multiple problems at once. The new, faster teleportation process means scientists can move blocks of this quantum information around within a computer or across a network, Huntington said.

Optics researcher Philippe Grangier at the Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, France, said it was a major breakthrough.

“It shows that the controlled manipulation of quantum objects has progressed steadily and achieved objectives that seemed impossible just a few years ago,” he wrote in an editorial that accompanies the study.

Lord Have Mercy Little iApps

You can’t buy absolution—at least, not anymore—but $1.99 will help you get there. A new app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch has been “developed for those who frequent the sacrament and those who wish to return” in what is the first known imprimatur to be given for an iPhone or iPad app. Can we get an Amen?

Confession: A Roman Catholic App was developed by Little iApps to help walk the penitent through the sacrament of penance, a.k.a. confession. The app won’t impart absolution to you—sorry, but there’s no getting out of the actual act of confession—but it does help one organize his or her sins into a handy list and maintain proper confessional decorum.

The app helps users examine their consciences by listing the 10 Commandments and asking users questions about their lives related to the fundamental rules of Christianity. Password protected profiles even allow the app to question a penitent soul about aspects of Christianity as they pertain to the person’s age, marital status, and gender, helping them to better enumerate their spiritual shortcomings and make sure nothing is forgotten when the get into the booth. Almost like a grocery list, except instead of general food items it lists all the ways you fall short of the glory of God.

It also helps users through the process of the confession itself, reminding them that when the priest says “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good,” the proper response is “For His mercy endures forever.” It even contains the traditional texts of several oft cited Catholic prayers, so when the priest prescribes you a handful of Hail Marys and a couple of Our Fathers, you won’t be at a loss for words.

The app is a direct response to Pope Benedict’s January World Communications Day address in which he gave new media and social media the Papal stamp of approval as tools for helping parishioners find “meaning, truth, and unity” in their everyday lives. That is, of course, if it is used wisely.

No word on whether the Vatican considers Angry Birds a “wise” use of technology.

Quantum Computer Courtesy D-Wave

Ramped-up research efforts at IBM and other labs in the U.S. and Europe could lead to more powerful and more prevalent quantum computers in the near future.

IBM is breathing new life into a quantum computing research division at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center, reports New York Times. The computer giant has hired alumni from promising quantum computing programs at Yale and the University of California-Santa Barbara, both of which made quantum leaps in the past year using standard superconducting material.

Groups at both universities have been using rhenium or niobium on a semiconductor surface and cooling the system to absolute zero so that it exhibits quantum behavior. As the Times reports, the method relies on standard microelectronics manufacturing tech, which could make quantum computers easier and cheaper to make.

The Santa Barbara researchers told the Times they believe they can double the computational power of their quantum computers by next year.

Quantum computing uses spooky action at a distance to conduct superfast calculations. Rather than using transistors to crunch the ones and zeroes of binary code, quantum computers store data as qubits, which can represent one and zero simultaneously. This superposition enables the computers to solve multiple problems at once, providing quick answers to tough questions. But observing a qubit strips it of this duality — you can only see one state at a time — so physicists must figure out how to extract data from a qubit without directly observing it. That’s where quantum entanglement comes in handy; two qubits can be connected by an invisible wave so that they share each other’s properties. You could then watch one qubit to see what its twin is computing.

None of this is simple, however; there are several competing methods for making the qubits, including laser-entangled ions, LED-powered entangled photons, and more. Google is working with a Canadian firm called D-Wave that has claimed 50-qubit computers, although skeptics have questioned that number. In most systems, the number of entangled qubits remains small, but Yale researchers believe they will increase in the next few years, the Times says.

Even better: with all this practice, physicists are getting a lot better at controlling quantum interactions. Their precision has increased a thousand-fold, one researcher said. That’s good news for anyone studying quantum mechanics.

EPROM Traditional electronic computer memory, made by Texas Instruments.

For years, particle physicists and computer scientists have been promising us vastly improved memory chips based on the spin of individual electrons, but concrete advances have been awfully elusive. Now a team at Ohio State has put together a working device to test spintronic memory, and used it successfully.

The team hooked a pair of leads to an array of magnets, and, by manipulating the spin of the electrons within the magnetic fields, were able to record and retrieve data.

Spintronics promises to double the density of computer storage, as each electron will be able to store two bits of data instead of one. Energy usage will drop as well, since the electrons won’t need to flow around to do their work. The result would be smaller devices with smaller batteries.

io9 quotes Arthur J. Epstein, a researcher on the project: "If we had a lighter weight spintronic device which operates itself at a lower energy cost, and if we could make it on a flexible polymer display, soldiers and other users could just roll it up and carry it."

Calculating Pi at Home A screenshot from the software that set the new record

Shigeru Kondo spent some $18,000 to build a desktop Windows computer that, over the course of three months, shattered the world record for calculating pi. Running in the 54-year-old system engineer’s home, where he lives with his wife and mother, the machine calculated pi to 5 trillion decimal places, nearly double the previous record of 2.7 trillion set by French programmer Fabrice Bellard late last year.

Kondo collaborated via email with Alexander Yee, an American computer science student, to do the calculation. Yee provided the software, called y-cruncher, which ran on Kondo’s homemade machine under Windows Server 2008R2. The computer was built out of individually sourced parts, including Intel processors and 20 hard drives.

Kondo tells AFP that he was alone in his room at midnight when the 5-trillion mark was reached. His wife and mother were asleep and, when he told them, expressed "no particular feelings" about the monumental achievement.

Terapixel Night Sky Microsoft’s Terapixel project, part of Microsoft Research, stitched together more than 1,700 pairs of photographic plates from two powerful telescopes to create the clearest, largest night sky map yet.

First they gave us a high-res tour of Mars — now Microsoft has made the largest and clearest night-sky map ever. It’s a terapixel image: 1,000 000,000,000 pixels.

The software giant’s Terapixel project stitched together 1,791 pairs of red-light and blue-light plates from telescopes in California and Australia. The result is the map above, which covers the night sky of the northern and southern hemispheres.

Using WorldWide Telescope and Bing maps, you can zoom in on the cosmos, peering through the dust of the Milky Way to distant galaxies. Microsoft announced Terapixel July 13 at its annual Research Faculty Summit.

To view every pixel of the image, you’d need a half-million high-definition televisions. If you tried to print it, the document would extend the length of a football field, Microsoft says.

The project required re-computing all the image data collected by the Digitized Sky Survey during the past 50 years. The images, produced by the Palomar telescope in California and the Schmidt telescope in Australia, each cover an area of the cosmos six and a half degrees square.

The map’s quality and clarity stems from computerized changes to the original images, which have varying levels of brightness, color saturation, noise and vignetting, which is darkening of the corners.

Developers ran parallel code on 512 computer cores in a Windows High Performance Computing cluster, and were able to process the raw digitized data in about half a day, according to Microsoft. Once the files were decompressed, they had to undergo some changes to correct the vignetting problem. Red and blue plates had to be precisely aligned to make a color image, and then everything had to be stitched together, which took about three more hours.

Terapixel then used an image optimization program to create a seamless, spherical panorama of the sky. That took about four hours, according to Microsoft.

The final image is 802 GB.

Night Sky Before and After: A previous all-sky map, at left, and the new one at right.

After a weekend using the iPad, I’ve realized I’m not interested in hedging my reaction to it with careful considerations of its lack of a USB port or webcam. It’s not every day, or every year or maybe even every decade that we’re able to see a piece of technology that takes a familiar human experience–here, using a computer–and fundamentally changes it. But that is what I think the iPad has done.

Maybe this is a honeymoon phase. Time will tell. But I don’t think it is. To support that, and because I know no one wants to read another monolithic 3,000-word iPad review running through every feature, what follows are some assorted notes and impressions from my first weekend of using this machine and how it pertains to the future of using computers. Some may be on the fragmentary side–please jump in the comments if you feel inspired to add to the conversation or would like to hear more.

The Screen

It starts from the moment you pick it up and that obsidian black pool comes to life. On paper it’s not by any means the highest-resolution screen at 1024×768 spread over 9.7 inches of diagonal glass. Many netbooks pack a higher resolution into the same size. But somehow, it manages to be the most breathtaking screen I’ve ever seen. Maybe because there’s basically nothing else–an inch of black glass bezel surrounds it, rimmed by a thin lip of aluminum, but from the front that’s it. All screen. And its saturation and clarity is astounding.

And oh yeah, you can touch it. You can touch everything, and it reacts instantly. It’s fast. The glass feels cool and smooth on your finger, but after a while you’re not touching glass. You’re touching words, pictures, buttons, everything. The Internet. And everything responds.

Plenty of words have been written about the iPad’s touchscreen interface, and I can pretty much guarantee that none of them will mean anything to you until you use it. It just can’t be expressed. On paper it’s just a giant iPod touch. Yes, I’ve heard that a few times, even said it myself. But then it’s in your hand and you’re gliding your finger over your favorite websites, panning around the globe with your pinkie tip in Google Maps, feeling like a CIA analyst manning some future spy satellite terminal. It’s one brainstem-level pleasure after another; it reacts to some base human instinct to touch and manipulate something shiny put in front of us, and well, we can’t really argue with the brain stem, can we?

And that’s why it changes everything. The layers of abstraction are gone, and we’re interacting with graphical information in the most natural way possible. Apple’s unrelenting focus on simplicity means everything but the touch drops away.

Nothing But Interface

Think about it–on your computer, interfaces are stacked inside each other like a Russian doll. The web site you’re looking at sits inside the browser, which sits inside a folder, which sits inside your operating system. Each interface has its own set of conceits and constraints, meaning the resulting experienced is subject to a great many rules dictating what it can and can’t be. But that’s not how it is on the iPad. There, a weather app adopts the perfect interface for browsing weather information–pinch and zoom on the giant world radar map; tap the forecast and current conditions blocks for more detailed pop-ups. You touch and it responds. And that’s just weather.

The Future of Software is Becoming the Future of Hardware

Like the iPhone, the iPad is a blank slate ready to morph into any device with any interface imaginable. It’s a million gadgets in one, with each able to express itself with the perfect interface. The hardware is designed to fade into the background, so in a way, developers are conjuring their software into tangible, concrete things that act, essentially, as hardware. The list of physical real word objects the iPhone has made irrelevant: cheap pocket digital camera, GPS navigator, e-reader, voice recorder, bicycle computer, iPod–the list goes on. The iPad, with a screen four times the size, will only make this list longer.

Using the iPad on the Toilet

Is so, so great. Apple’s case with its wedge-shaped lap stand is an essential tool here.

With a Keyboard

For more proof of how this is the future, connect any Bluetooth keyboard. Immediately, Apple’s Pages (the significance of which I’ve already written about) becomes the coolest word processor I’ve ever used. A word processor? Cool? But with Words and a wireless keyboard, you can enter text just like we’ve been doing for generations, and see it appear on a blank white screen. Then pick up this screen, turn it vertically, and add pictures and other formatting with your fingers. Touch a misspelled word and pick the proper correction. Even after a few days, I already know this is how I want to create anything made of pictures and text in the future.

I’m Typing on the iPad RIGHT NOW

I wasn’t going to honor the cliche of typing a review of a device on the device itself, but now that I paired up a Bluetooth keyboard i had in the cupboard, I can’t help myself.

Going From an iPad Back to an iPhone

Is hilarious. The same interface motifs put back on a tiny screen makes the proportions seem completely out of whack. Making the world’s most advanced smartphone look like a baby’s toy is something Apple can’t be excited about. This, more than anything, lends credence to the rumors of a new iPhone this summer with a higher resolution display.

It’s not Perfect

Believe it or not, a gadget can change computing forever but still have flaws. Shocking, I know! Almost all of the gripes over what the iPad lacks miss the point, but the one that’s spot on? The iPad needs multitasking.

Not the multitasking we’re used to on the desktop computer. No task bar, no ctrl-alt-delete. Just a small, elegant way to tell us when we have a new IM or email while we’re reading Twitter or playing a game. The ability to let apps that play music continue to play it while we do other things.

Without this, one of the internet’s fundamental forms of communication–the instant message–is basically impossible on the iPad. This thing is supposed to replace the laptop you keep open while you watch TV at home, right? Well, what you do on that laptop is keep 12 browser tabs open and four Google Chat windows, responding to them at your leisure. Not possible on the iPad.

Something like Android’s pull-down notifications drawer would work. In fact, the iPad’s interface already hints at this–when a song is playing in the iPod app, you get a little play icon in the ever-present black strip at the top. It’s less than a centimeter thick, but that’s all it needs to be. Apple, open up that area to the SDK and let apps notify you of things there–with the iPad’s increased screen real estate, it’s time to turn the iPhone’s fairly puny background notification system into something truly usable.

Without it, I find myself flying around from app to app at an exhausting pace. Ironically, Apple’s rigid focus on apps performing one task at a time that actually, I think, reduces the focus you’re able to give any one app on the screen. I’d love to read Moby Dick on the iPad for free, but, NEW EMAIL! Someone has to have replied to my wittily provocative tweet on Queequeg’s mark by now, RIGHT? Tap tap tap. Book interrupted.

Do You Need an iPad?

No. As many others have pointed out, it’s just another device. But you/I didn’t need an iPod when they first came out either. But when the iPod debuted, I was content to connect a tape deck to my computer to record the dozen or so MP3s I could suck down from Napster through my 56k modem during any given month. I just didn’t see the need because I didn’t have thousands of MP3s. The content environment was not yet ready.

Do we “need” an iPod today? We still don’t. But MP3s are now a much larger part of our lives than they were in 2001 (which, of course, the iPod is partly responsible for) The buying question has changed from “do you want to listen to your music portably in this new digital format” to “do you want to listen to your music portably.” What will the iPad’s similar commodity be? Until that’s defined, no one needs one. But my guess is that it won’t be long until touch-based apps move from novelty to necessity.

In Closing

The iPad is not without problems, some of which have the potential to make the Internet a less happy place than it is now. Yes, Apple’s well-documented closed system via iTunes. Apple is turning into a monopolistic recreation of the Hollywood studio system in the 1940s: if you need something done right, you work with us and no one else. But even then, there was more than one major studio. Not now.

This is bad. But fortunately for Apple, it’s bad in a way that creates an unbelievably pure and easy user experience on the iPad. (For more on this, see Joel Johnson responding beautifully to the closed system crowd).

The iPad presents a computing philosophy that not everyone agrees with: unrelenting simplicity at the cost of openness. But it’s hard to argue it’s not a perfect execution of that philosophy.