http://prasantgopal.com/blog Quantum takes of a Classical World Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:18:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If god appears before me and says, ``the world is going to end, only you and someone else of your choice will be spared". At the first look, I do not if it is a boon or a bane! But, If I am forced to make a choice; I ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=561 It has been eons since I blogged. The reasons, however, are not really worthy of being listed. It has been nearly 6 months since I arrived at MIT. I thought it is a good time to recollect the good old days of the past and the new ME which started ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=545 This is my first post from MIT/Boston. It is nearly 10 days since I landed here. Things so far have turned out to be really bright. The things that I loved (so far) at MIT: 1 . You can cross register at Harvard. That is, you can do your course-work either ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=542 In one of the conversations, Harith drew lines between Director Michael Bay and Rajamouli; I was very much fascinated by his analogy and I googled to land upon this article by Srinivas Kanchibhotla and I could not resist myself from lifting it shamelessly. 'Hollywood standards' is a phrase ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=531 Here’s one I’m pretty sure every IIIT student has had to endure at some point. It goes like this: Non-IIIT person: Hey, do you know how to deal with (random computer problem)? IIIT student: Uh, no…sorry. Non-IIIT person: What? You go to IIIT, don’t you? And you can’t fix a COMPUTER?!? The way I ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=526 This post is being in the context of Telugu Film Industry. Observing the trends for the past two years - I cannot but relish the fact that the only movies into which sufficient effort was put were received by the audiences. Racap of 2008: Hits: Gamyam, ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=522 This is what the orientation camp at MIT seems to offer! There are several other exciting events like Prudential Skywalk and Icecream, Cambridge Pub Crawl, Hiking Trip to White Mountains. There is lot of partying in near future :-) The complete itinerary is given here. I hope most of the you are ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=514 P is (informally) the class of all problems that have polynomial-time algorithms. For simplicity, we focus on decision problems (those having a yes-or-no answer). This is not a serious assumption as using theory of Digital Logic, we can compute each bit of the answer. NP (Non deterministic Polynomial-Time) is (informally) the ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=506 How can Quantum physics aid Computing ? It is widely believed that quantum computers cannot solve NP-Complete problems in Polynomial (.) time. Quantum mechanics usually allows only linear transformations. In lay man terms, only those transformations which can be described by a matrix. Surprisingly, an arbitrary amount of non-linearity (say, non-zero quantity) ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=503 After watching yesterday's T20 world cup match, I felt how can be this the best team that India can send to the world Cup?  Especially when you look at the following: Likes of  [Rohit + Raina + Yuvraj] leaking nearly 20-25 runs which in my  humble opinion was school boy stuff! Ishant ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=492 The set theory taught to us in the secondary school levels has a big trouble -- It cannot be called a theory in the first place. For it suffers a contradiction, viz., Let us call a set ``abnormal" if it is a member of itself, and ``normal" otherwise. For example, take ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=486 No, No. I am not referring to the English(Indian) Premiere League or Serie A. Those are the ones I am least concerned about these days. The past week or so has been very hectic for me. Hmm.....Hmm..... So, after an indecision/dilemma for about an year or so - its finally ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=482  In 1942, the logician Kurt  Gödel and Albert Einstein became close friends; they walked to and from their offices every day, exchanging ideas about science, philosophy, politics and the lost world of German science in which both had grown up. By 1949,  Gödel had produced a remarkable proof - `` In any universe described ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=476 It is, indeed, sad that Prof. Venkaiah will be joining the CR Rao's Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science. He has contributed a lot to IIIT and has certainly left his marks on us as well as the Institute. The void created from his sabbatical at IIIT (officially, ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=470 Let say a cricket match is being played out  between India and Pakistan and 3 spectators - A, B, C - are watching the match. A is from mumbai and loves a mumbaikar doing well. Rather, due to regional differences hates Dada, laxman or even Dravid performing. B loves India ... http://prasantgopal.com/blog/?p=435