Quantum . Quantum Week 2 cont’d

Post cont’d

• I found a group that walks to the summer school in the mornings; it’s about a 20 minute walk, and quite refreshing.
• This week has been steady on the error-correcting codes, which has been awesome. I also saw a talk by Barbara on ECC, got a bunch of great recs for papers and some books, and got invited to a quantum hackathon even. We already started prepping for that via Discord.
• There is just so much going on every day. Today, there was the estimathon! I’ve played it before at the Symposium, but basically the guy who invented it, Andy, showed up and we got a bunch of tshirts that even say estimathon on them, and we formed teams to play. Our team, the Phase Estimators, even got second place!
• In terms of the other Quantum workshop online, we did both Grover’s Algorithm and DiVincenzo Criteria, and Matt, the instructor, was totally my jam in the way he explained things. And then we played around in Qiskit a bit, too, in terms of building the circuits and running them, etc.

Photos

• Our team was the “Phase Estimators”! Some people our team wanted to name our team “SBF used to work at JS”, but we decided against that (lol). In any case, none of us really wants to work at those places (I think more CS people dream of working there, especially in Programming Languages and stuff; I remember people were quite in awe because I had a stash of them to wear at the Formal Methods boot camp), but Math people love free t-shirts!

• Andy, the creator of Estimathon, explains the rules. No calculators, no internets!

• The tshirts! I love that they’re not obnoxiously JS tshirts, but instead are estimathon ones. That’s unique!

• Barbara gave a great cross-section talk on ECC.

• Lunch! It was tasty but we were all so tired after eating all that pasta and bread! The caterer always has a “joke of the day” for us; it’s usually a corny Maths joke lol.

• The estimathon had a buttload of pizza. I’ve never seen so many pizza boxes in my life! It must have been a JS trader’s starting salary’s worth of pizza or something lol.

• You could make a fort with it!

• Saw these in the morning, walking on the way to the summer school. There are so many beautiful flowers like these all over,and they’re especially beautiful after rain has just fallen (as was the case this morning).

That’s it.