7,169 research outputs found
Philosophical Aspects of Quantum Information Theory
Quantum information theory represents a rich subject of discussion for those
interested in the philosphical and foundational issues surrounding quantum
mechanics for a simple reason: one can cast its central concerns in terms of a
long-familiar question: How does the quantum world differ from the classical
one? Moreover, deployment of the concepts of information and computation in
novel contexts hints at new (or better) means of understanding quantum
mechanics, and perhaps even invites re-assessment of traditional material
conceptions of the basic nature of the physical world. In this paper I review
some of these philosophical aspects of quantum information theory, begining
with an elementary survey of the theory, seeking to highlight some of the
principles and heuristics involved. We move on to a discussion of the nature
and definition of quantum information and deploy the findings in discussing the
puzzles surrounding teleportation. The final two sections discuss,
respectively, what one might learn from the development of quantum computation
(both about the nature of quantum systems and about the nature of computation)
and consider the impact of quantum information theory on the traditional
foundational questions of quantum mechanics (treating of the views of
Zeilinger, Bub and Fuchs, amongst others).Comment: LaTeX; 55pp; 3 figs. Forthcoming in Rickles (ed.) The Ashgate
Companion to the New Philosophy of Physic
Bounding Rationality by Discounting Time
Consider a game where Alice generates an integer and Bob wins if he can
factor that integer. Traditional game theory tells us that Bob will always win
this game even though in practice Alice will win given our usual assumptions
about the hardness of factoring.
We define a new notion of bounded rationality, where the payoffs of players
are discounted by the computation time they take to produce their actions. We
use this notion to give a direct correspondence between the existence of
equilibria where Alice has a winning strategy and the hardness of factoring.
Namely, under a natural assumption on the discount rates, there is an
equilibriumwhere Alice has a winning strategy iff there is a linear-time
samplable distribution with respect to which Factoring is hard on average.
We also give general results for discounted games over countable action
spaces, including showing that any game with bounded and computable payoffs has
an equilibrium in our model, even if each player is allowed a countable number
of actions. It follows, for example, that the Largest Integer game has an
equilibrium in our model though it has no Nash equilibria or epsilon-Nash
equilibria.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of The First Symposium on Innovations in
Computer Scienc
Chasing diagrams in cryptography
Cryptography is a theory of secret functions. Category theory is a general
theory of functions. Cryptography has reached a stage where its structures
often take several pages to define, and its formulas sometimes run from page to
page. Category theory has some complicated definitions as well, but one of its
specialties is taming the flood of structure. Cryptography seems to be in need
of high level methods, whereas category theory always needs concrete
applications. So why is there no categorical cryptography? One reason may be
that the foundations of modern cryptography are built from probabilistic
polynomial-time Turing machines, and category theory does not have a good
handle on such things. On the other hand, such foundational problems might be
the very reason why cryptographic constructions often resemble low level
machine programming. I present some preliminary explorations towards
categorical cryptography. It turns out that some of the main security concepts
are easily characterized through the categorical technique of *diagram
chasing*, which was first used Lambek's seminal `Lecture Notes on Rings and
Modules'.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures; to appear in: 'Categories in Logic, Language and
Physics. Festschrift on the occasion of Jim Lambek's 90th birthday', Claudia
Casadio, Bob Coecke, Michael Moortgat, and Philip Scott (editors); this
version: fixed typos found by kind reader
- …