Abstract:

Some computer scientists like to pride themselves in not understanding the
model of quantum computation at all... In this talk I will present three
completely different ways to define quantum computation: One is the
standard way (based on unitary gates), the second resembles Markov chains
(it is called adiabatic computation), and the last one is based on knots
and braids (and its name is topological quantum computation). Thinking
about quantum computation in different ways might help in tackling the
difficult challenges the field faces today, and might allow scientists
outside of the area to join the effort... My hope is that by the end of
the talk, each one in the audience will understand at least one of these
models, and maybe something about why such different models turn out to be
equivalent.

The talk is based on recent joint works with van Dam, Jones, Landau,
Lloyd, Kempe, Regev, and Ta-Shma, as well as on works by others.
I will assume 0 background.