John Watrous (computer scientist)

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John Harrison Watrous
John Watrous.jpg
Alma mater University of Wisconsin–Madison
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science, Quantum Computing
Institutions University of Calgary
University of Waterloo
Institute for Quantum Computing
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Doctoral advisor Eric Bach

John Harrison Watrous is the Technical Director of IBM Quantum Education at IBM and was a professor of computer science at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, a member of the Institute for Quantum Computing, an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. [1] [2] He was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary from 2002 to 2006 where he held a Canada Research Chair in quantum computing. [1]

He is an editor of the journal Theory of Computing [3] and former editor for the journal Quantum Information & Computation . [4] His research interests include quantum information and quantum computation. He is well known for his work on quantum interactive proofs, and the quantum analogue of the celebrated result IP  =  PSPACE: QIP  = PSPACE. [5] [6] [7] This was preceded by a series of results, showing QIP can be constrained to 3 messages, [8] QIP is contained in EXP, [9] and the 2-message version of QIP is in PSPACE. [10] He has also published important papers on quantum finite automata [11] and quantum cellular automata. [12] With Scott Aaronson, he showed that certain forms of time travel can make quantum and classical computation equivalent: together, the authors showed that quantum effects do not offer advantages for computation if computers can send information to the past through a type of closed timelike curve proposed by the physicist David Deutsch. [13]

He obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the supervision of Eric Bach. [14] [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PSPACE</span> Set of decision problems

In computational complexity theory, PSPACE is the set of all decision problems that can be solved by a Turing machine using a polynomial amount of space.

In computational complexity theory, a decision problem is PSPACE-complete if it can be solved using an amount of memory that is polynomial in the input length and if every other problem that can be solved in polynomial space can be transformed to it in polynomial time. The problems that are PSPACE-complete can be thought of as the hardest problems in PSPACE, the class of decision problems solvable in polynomial space, because a solution to any one such problem could easily be used to solve any other problem in PSPACE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interactive proof system</span>

In computational complexity theory, an interactive proof system is an abstract machine that models computation as the exchange of messages between two parties: a prover and a verifier. The parties interact by exchanging messages in order to ascertain whether a given string belongs to a language or not. The prover possesses unlimited computational resources but cannot be trusted, while the verifier has bounded computation power but is assumed to be always honest. Messages are sent between the verifier and prover until the verifier has an answer to the problem and has "convinced" itself that it is correct.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theoretical computer science</span> Subfield of computer science and mathematics

Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, formal language theory, the lambda calculus and type theory.

The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computational Theory. The award is named in honor of Kurt Gödel. Gödel's connection to theoretical computer science is that he was the first to mention the "P versus NP" question, in a 1956 letter to John von Neumann in which Gödel asked whether a certain NP-complete problem could be solved in quadratic or linear time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PH (complexity)</span> Class in computational complexity theory

In computational complexity theory, the complexity class PH is the union of all complexity classes in the polynomial hierarchy:

In computational complexity theory, an Arthur–Merlin protocol, introduced by Babai (1985), is an interactive proof system in which the verifier's coin tosses are constrained to be public. Goldwasser & Sipser (1986) proved that all (formal) languages with interactive proofs of arbitrary length with private coins also have interactive proofs with public coins.

Descriptive complexity is a branch of computational complexity theory and of finite model theory that characterizes complexity classes by the type of logic needed to express the languages in them. For example, PH, the union of all complexity classes in the polynomial hierarchy, is precisely the class of languages expressible by statements of second-order logic. This connection between complexity and the logic of finite structures allows results to be transferred easily from one area to the other, facilitating new proof methods and providing additional evidence that the main complexity classes are somehow "natural" and not tied to the specific abstract machines used to define them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IP (complexity)</span>

In computational complexity theory, the class IP is the class of problems solvable by an interactive proof system. It is equal to the class PSPACE. The result was established in a series of papers: the first by Lund, Karloff, Fortnow, and Nisan showed that co-NP had multiple prover interactive proofs; and the second, by Shamir, employed their technique to establish that IP=PSPACE. The result is a famous example where the proof does not relativize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shlomi Dolev</span>

Shlomi Dolev is a Rita Altura Trust Chair Professor in Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and the head of the BGU Negev Hi-Tech Faculty Startup Accelerator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Sipser</span> American theoretical computer scientist (born 1954)

Michael Fredric Sipser is an American theoretical computer scientist who has made early contributions to computational complexity theory. He is a professor of applied mathematics and was the Dean of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

ACC<sup>0</sup>

ACC0, sometimes called ACC, is a class of computational models and problems defined in circuit complexity, a field of theoretical computer science. The class is defined by augmenting the class AC0 of constant-depth "alternating circuits" with the ability to count; the acronym ACC stands for "AC with counters". Specifically, a problem belongs to ACC0 if it can be solved by polynomial-size, constant-depth circuits of unbounded fan-in gates, including gates that count modulo a fixed integer. ACC0 corresponds to computation in any solvable monoid. The class is very well studied in theoretical computer science because of the algebraic connections and because it is one of the largest concrete computational models for which computational impossibility results, so-called circuit lower bounds, can be proved.

A quantum cellular automaton (QCA) is an abstract model of quantum computation, devised in analogy to conventional models of cellular automata introduced by John von Neumann. The same name may also refer to quantum dot cellular automata, which are a proposed physical implementation of "classical" cellular automata by exploiting quantum mechanical phenomena. QCA have attracted a lot of attention as a result of its extremely small feature size and its ultra-low power consumption, making it one candidate for replacing CMOS technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuri Gurevich</span> American computer scientist

Yuri Gurevich, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is an American computer scientist and mathematician and the inventor of abstract state machines.

In computational complexity theory, QMA, which stands for Quantum Merlin Arthur, is the set of languages for which, when a string is in the language, there is a polynomial-size quantum proof that convinces a polynomial time quantum verifier of this fact with high probability. Moreover, when the string is not in the language, every polynomial-size quantum state is rejected by the verifier with high probability.

Lance Jeremy Fortnow is a computer scientist known for major results in computational complexity and interactive proof systems. He is currently Dean of the College of Computing at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

In computational complexity theory, the class QIP is the quantum computing analogue of the classical complexity class IP, which is the set of problems solvable by an interactive proof system with a polynomial-time verifier and one computationally unbounded prover. Informally, IP is the set of languages for which a computationally unbounded prover can convince a polynomial-time verifier to accept when the input is in the language and cannot convince the verifier to accept when the input is not in the language. In other words, the prover and verifier may interact for polynomially many rounds, and if the input is in the language the verifier should accept with probability greater than 2/3, and if the input is not in the language, the verifier should be reject with probability greater than 2/3. In IP, the verifier is like a BPP machine. In QIP, the communication between the prover and verifier is quantum, and the verifier can perform quantum computation. In this case the verifier is like a BQP machine.

Quantum refereed game in quantum information processing is a class of games in the general theory of quantum games. It is played between two players, Alice and Bob, and arbitrated by a referee. The referee outputs the pay-off for the players after interacting with them for a fixed number of rounds, while exchanging quantum information.

Ronald Michiel de Wolf is a Dutch Computer Scientist, currently a Senior Researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and a professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

References

  1. 1 2 John Watrous at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research website.
  2. John Watrous Archived 2011-07-06 at the Wayback Machine at the QuantumWorks website.
  3. List of editors of Theory of Computing.
  4. List of editors of Quantum Information & Computation.
  5. Lance Fortnow (2009-07-29). "QIP = PSPACE". Computational Complexity. Retrieved 2009-12-30.
  6. Dave Bacon (2009-07-28). "OMG QIP=PSPACE!". The Quantum Pontiff. Archived from the original on 2010-01-05. Retrieved 2009-12-30.
  7. Rahul Jain; Zhengfeng Ji; Sarvagya Upadhyay; John Watrous (2009). "QIP = PSPACE". arXiv: 0907.4737 [quant-ph].
  8. Watrous, John (2003). "PSPACE has constant-round quantum interactive proof systems". Theor. Comput. Sci. Essex, UK: Elsevier Science Publishers Ltd. 292 (3): 575–588. doi: 10.1016/S0304-3975(01)00375-9 . ISSN   0304-3975.
  9. Kitaev, Alexei; Watrous, John (2000). "Parallelization, amplification, and exponential time simulation of quantum interactive proof systems". STOC '00: Proceedings of the thirty-second annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing. ACM. pp. 608–617. ISBN   978-1-58113-184-0.
  10. Rahul Jain; Sarvagya Upadhyay; John Watrous (2009). "Two-message quantum interactive proofs are in PSPACE". arXiv: 0905.1300 [cs.CC].
  11. Kondacs, A.; Watrous, J. (1997). "On the power of quantum finite state automata". Proceedings of the 38th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. pp. 66–75.
  12. Watrous, John (1995). "On one-dimensional quantum cellular automata". Proc. 36th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (Milwaukee, WI, 1995). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Comput. Soc. Press. pp. 528–537. doi:10.1109/SFCS.1995.492583. ISBN   0-8186-7183-1. MR   1619103..
  13. Lisa Zyga (2008-11-20). "How Time-Traveling Could Affect Quantum Computing". PhysOrg . Retrieved 2009-12-30.
  14. John Watrous at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  15. John Watrous at the Institute for Quantum Computing directory.