Thursday, December 08, 2005

Quantum computing guru wins 2005 Edge of Computation Prize

I'm a bit late in posting this, but David Deutsch has won the 2005 Edge of Computation Prize for his seminal work on quantum computing. From the nomination: "Although the general idea of a quantum computer had been proposed earlier by Richard Feynman, in 1985 David Deutsch wrote the key paper which proposed the idea of a quantum computer and initiated the study of how to make one. Since then he has continued to be a pioneer and a leader in a rapidly growing field that is now called quantum information science."

The only nominees with whom I have a vague connection were Peter Bentley, for his work on "digital gardening" (he has a paper in a forthcoming special issue of Natural Computing that I edited with Dave Hodgson), and Ehud Shapiro, for his construction of a molecular automaton (I played a part in validating his group's Guinness World Record for "Smallest Biological Computing Device").

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