It is all about me!

you have nothign to prove, except theorems

I am sitting under a huge tree in the Bellairs yard. The birds are all producing different little chirps and songs trying compete for the airwaves. And today there is lots of sunshine!

I don’t necessarily want to be too much in the sunshine since I got burned yesterday, but still it makes me happy that the rainy days have stopped.

Tonight after the talks we will probably go to the happy-hour at the Colony club next door and then to Oistins for some quality fish and then maybe some Pina Coladas — that is if I remember to buy Rhum this afternoon!

Ok. da talks are starting…. godda go

Ih been here for some time now und chilln’ feelin da breeze and the sun on my skin.
My back problems are sort of going away with the warm weather — rather I can crack my back much more easily than I used to…
Conference-wise it is all good and fine. Learning a lot about the reversible theory of entanglement from the man himself. Friday I have to give a talk myself — that is going to be fun!

Let’s prepare an outline for that right here and now:

== Multiparty Squashed Entanglement ==

= Intro =
- There are many ways to measure entanglement
- Required properties: non-increasing under LOCC, zero-on separable states, asymptotically continuous, (weakly) additive,
- Desired properties: convexity, full additivity, strong full additivity, faithfulness, monogamy, lockability
- Multiparty entanglement is more complex

= Squashed Entanglement =
- I(A;B)
- quantum information cannot be copied, classical can
- Esq = inf_E I(A:B|E)
- many good properties[CW04]: zero on separable states, LOCC monotone, convex, additive, asymptotically continuous,
- upper bound for: distillable entanglement, distillable key
- lower bound for: entanglement cost, and entanglement of formation
- inspired by cryptographic measure: intrinsic information
- used in the [FQSW] for 2-party distributed compression

= Multiparty Information =
- I(A;B) is the mutual information
- what is the multiparty generalization ?
- can think about it also as I(A;B) = S(\rho_AB || \rho_A (+) \rho_B )
- Multiparty information is analogous S(\rho_ABC || \rho_A (+) \rho_B (+) \rho_C )
- Conditional version: I(A;B;C|E) = H(A|E) + H(B|E) + H(C|E) - H(ABC|E) =
= H(AE) + H(BE) + H(CE) - H(ABCE) - 2*H(E)
- properties:
I(A;B;X1;X2; · · · ;Xm) − I(A;B) = I(AB;X1;X2; · · · ;Xm). (merging terms)
I(AB;X1; · · ·Xm|E) ≥ I(A;X1; · · ·Xm|E) (monotonicity)
I(AA′;X1; . . . ;Xm|E) ≥ I(A;X1; . . . ;Xm|A′E) (chain-type rule)

= Multiparty Esq =
- Esq = inf_E I(A;B;C|E)
- inherits many of the properties: zero on separable states, LOCC monotone, convex, asymptotically continuous, subadditive
- later shown to be additive [YHHHOS07]
- Esq(GHZ_m) = m/2
- Esq(|W>

= Properties =

= Applications =

= Open problems =
- Can we restrict the optimization over extensions E of finite size
if can then we can show that Esq = 0 ==> state separable
- compute for more states

[CW04] Esq
[YHHHOS07] Multiparty Esq
[AHS07] Multiparty Esq

Textbook authors are in a conflict of interest: we expect them to explain the material “as best as they could”, which to me means as succinct as possible + examples. The publishers, however, expect them to write lots of stuff so that the book will have more pages and since more is better the book can be sold for a higher price.

I am a big believer in simplicity … it even makes mathematical sense. My future texbook company will keep that in mind and make short and sweet textbooks.

It has been something like 2 years solid since my last midterm. I had forgotten what it is like :)
It is like a mini-version of the final rush… It makes me think that I am too old for school. I still like “learning”, but I’m not sure I can handle all the doing-things-for-grades.

This sucks though because when trying to study on my own I am rarely productive. In fact, I tend to sleep-in and/or dissipate my attention. So what is the solution?
Study solo but become dedicated? That is easy to say — but then I have been wanting that for so long and achieved only limited change to my lazy character.
Perhaps my lack of motivation is an indication that I don’t care enough about what I am doing? This is kind of true — since most of my time is spent doing things that have to be done instead of doing research into the important things. Call it inappropriate allocation of mental energy.
The other option would be to get a job in which case my expectations to “like what I am doing” will be diminished. Jobs suck though…

You know what is the problem? It just dawned on me: organization. If I plan things well I can take care of the “little things” faster and leave more room for the cool stuff. That and finally organize the “business ideas” folder so you stop carrying it to school every day! I’ll figure it all out eventually… :)

Check out this quality song (save as).

I just finished my Optimization assignment where I had to program the steepest descent and Newton methods of optimizing a function. I chose to do the coding in sage.

I can’t say that it was a good experience, but not because the software wasn’t good — rather there were so many cool things to try out and play with that I wasted a lot of time.

The interface is still a little rough around the edges. Take for example the matrix methods — they exist but you have to explicitly say over which field you are building your matrices….
m = matrix(RDF, [[1,2], [3,4] ])
where RDF stands for “real double float” — without that my matrix inverses were running into DivideByZero problems.

Also a vector v was not iterable — you couldn’t just do v[0], but that was easy to get out of with v.list().

Overall though — it is an amazing amalgamation of math software and a very promising platform. The notebook interface (web2.py + twisted server) is VERY powerful with latex integration + graphics + sharing and all.

Give it a few more years and this will be the leading math package out there!

PS: You can see the “published” notebooks here. If anyone wants to try it interactively then should email me and I can give them a demo account on the cube notebook.

It is fairly easy to setup a new “locale” for your django powered website.
The internationalization docs are very informative.

Of course… I wouldn’t just go with what is there for me — i decided I want to be fancy and I put the following in my settings.py

LANGUAGES = (
    ('fr', u'Franxe7ais'),
    ('en', u'English'),
)

after wasting a few hours trying to debug this I am removing all unicode from the damn settings !…

LANGUAGES = (
    ('fr', u'French'),
    ('en', u'English'),
)

and everything works. I guess if I REALLY want to have Fran_cais shown in that select box I can do an “en” locale that has French —> Francais :)

why not !

Just a quick note about python on debian. The default version is 2.4, which means that /usr/bin/python –> /usr/bin/python2.4. You can change that by changing the symlink.

rm /usr/bin/python
ln -s /usr/bin/python2.5 /usr/bin/python


But what I didn’t know is that you should also edit the file /usr/share/python/debian_defaults and change it to something like this:

[DEFAULT]
# the default python version
default-version = python2.5
# all supported python versions
supported-versions = python2.4, python2.5
# formerly supported python versions
old-versions = python2.3
# unsupported versions, including older versions
unsupported-versions = python2.3

however…. this doesn’t seem to be IT because when I typed in:
apt-get install python-imaging
it still put it in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages

oh well…. a manual install again :)

Ivan