1. IN BRIEF:
Conference Announcement:
Workshop on Physics and Computation
Boston University School of Engineering:
Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering
November 22-24, 1996
1. IN BRIEF:
The PhysComp'96 workshop will be held November 22-24, 1996 (the weekend before Thanksgiving, from Friday morning through Sunday at noon) on the grounds of Boston University. The workshop will be aimed at FUNDAMENTAL connections between physics and computation: What aspects of physics can best be understood as primarily concerned with information processing? (Cf. the birth of thermodynamics, when the primary concern was energy processing.) More practically, what questions should we ask of physics that are relevant to its domestication for computational purposes? Conversely, what models of computation---what logic primitives, algorithms, and data structures---best match the native computing capabilities of physics? Topics that are most appropriate to PhysComp'96 include, but are not limited to:
2. WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NOW --- Please acknowledge
receipt of this announcement by filling out and mailing back the questionnaire
is Section 8 below. --- Please feel free to suggest additions or corrections
to the mailing list (see Section 9). - You are welcome to distribute or post
this message. 3. For up-to-date online information, go to the workshop's home
page, at
http://pm0.bu.edu/PhysComp96
3. ORGANIZATION PhysComp'96 is hosted by Boston University, Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering. The previous three workshops on this general theme were hosted by MIT (Boston, 1981) and Texas Instruments jointly with the IEEE Computer Society (Dallas, 1992 and 1994).
General Chairman:
| Tommaso Toffoli (Boston University) |
| Charles Bennett | (IBM Research) |
| Thomas Beth | (Univ. Karlsruhe) |
| Bruce Boghosian | (Boston U.) |
| Sam Braunstein | (Weizmann Inst.) |
| Alan Despain | ? |
| David DiVincenzo | (IBM Research) |
| Gary Doolen | (Los Alamos |
| Artur Ekert | (Oxford U.) |
| James Ellenbogen | (MITRE) |
| Gary Frazier | (Texas Instruments) |
| Edward Fredkin | (Boston U.) |
| Roscoe Giles | (Boston U.) |
| Brosl Hasslacher | (Los Alamos |
| Hideake Matsueda | (Kochi Univ.) |
| Jeff Kimble | ? |
| Tom Knight | (MIT) |
| Rolf Landuaer | (IBM Research) |
| Leonid Levin | (Boston U.) |
| Lev Levitin | (Boston U.) |
| Guenter Mahler | (Univ. Stuttgart) |
| Norman Margolus | (MIT) |
| Wolfgang Porod | (U. Notre |
| Asher Perez | (Technion) |
| Vaughan Pratt | (Stanford) ? |
| Peter Shor | (Bell Labs) |
| Richard Shoup | (Interval) |
| Paul Vitanyi | (C.W.I) |
| Wojciech Zurek | (LANL and |
| Michael Biafore | (MIT) |
| Joao Leao | (Boston University) |
| Doug Matzke | (texas Instruments) |
4. LOGISTICS (preliminary) All meetings will be held at Boston University. (BU is a short ride from Logan Airport by taxi or subway). A block of rooms is being reserved at the Howard Johnson's Hotel in Kenmore Square, near BU. (room rate: approx. $79 single/$89 double). The workshop fee will be approximately $200. Full registration details will be mailed at a later date. A modest amount of travel support for junior participants will hopefully be available.
5. TALKS, ABSTRACTS, AND PROCEEDINGS There will be short talks, medium talks, and invited talks. Extended abstracts (approximately 5 pages) of proposed contributions in LaTeX format must be electronically submitted by Monday April 29, 1996 to tt@bu.edu. An appropriate LaTeX style file will be made available. Notification of acceptance will be mailed by Friday July 1, 1996. The extended abstracts of accepted contributions will be distributed at the workshop in a bound volume, and will appear in the electronic journal InterJournal, published by the New England Complex Systems Institute. Authors are invited to turn their abstracts into full-length professional papers, to be published in a conventional refereed journal. (In the 1981 workshop, a similar arrangement led to three special issues of the International Journal of Theoretical Physics; in 1992 and 1994, workshop proceedings were published by the IEEE Computer Society Press). We are currently negotiating with two leading journals.
6. SPECIAL CONFERENCE THEME: For this year, there is one theme that we would like to see developed with more insistence. In spite of steadily increasing miniaturization, in today's computers a bit is still implemented as a relatively large lump of matter or energy (roughly, 10^6 particles or 10^6 kT) which "holds together" for a reasonable while thanks to the law of large numbers. IF (a BIG if) the size of circuit features continues to drop by a factor of two every four years, as it has steadily being doing for the last forty years, in twenty-five years a bit should be the size of a SINGLE atom! Presumably, logic gates will have to be implemented as MECHANICAL interactions between discrete objects of atomic size, rather than STATISTICAL interactions between diffuse clouds. This is not patently absurd. However, even if something like this should eventually come to pass, how will we be computing in the time in between---say, in TWENTY years? Will our bits at that time be clouds of 10 particles "plus-or-minus 4 particles"? Will recognizable logic operations be supported by cloud interactions where the standard deviation in the number of particle collisions is about 100%? If our shareholders insist on a straight course, we'll find ourselves climbing a no-man's hill where the exactness of macroscopic statistics has been left behind while that of microscopic mechanics isn't yet in sight. Should somebody risk some venture capital on digging a tunnel right UNDER the hill, hoping that the hill does indeed have another side---sloping on a fabulous valley of MICROPHYSICAL computing devices? a valley with a bottom hopefully even lower that that of today's MACRO-STATISTICAL computing devices? Ideas, anyone? Any mapmakers all too willing to draw a "small" Earth and a "near" India? Any Portuguese sages claiming (rightly so) that India is going to be much too far by the Western route? Any Columbuses willing to embark on the voyage nonetheless, by reason never to return, or by chance to discover something other than India? This is just a suggested unifying theme for this year's theme park. The individual rides need not explicitly pick up and develop the theme. But we hope that, with the right combination of rides, the theme will be recognizable from a distance above all the noise of the carnival.
7. CHECKLIST
| 1996 | Mon Apr 29 | Extended abstracts due. |
| Mon Jul 1 | Notification of acceptance for abstracts | |
| Sep 15 | Early registration fee cutoff date | |
| Thu Nov 21 | Out of town arrival, registration, and reception | |
| Fri Nov 22 | Sessions all day | |
| Sat Nov 23 | Sessions all day | |
| Sun Nov 24 | Sessions through 1:00pm | |
| 1997 | Jan 15 | Full papers due |
8. QUESTIONNAIRE:
a)
Electronic mailing list verification:
[If you do NOT want to
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address item(s) to be taken off the list].:
9.MAILING LIST
The most recent version of the mailing list can be examined at
http//:pm0.bu.edu/PhysComp96/list