Izvor martial arts + Volk tactical --- close quarters course highlights, 15 November 2015 at Moscow headquarters.

Working from a wall. Response to sudden attacks. Takedowns. 

Local Convertibility and the Quantum Simulation of Edge States in Many-Body Systems

I've been reading this paper ^ by Fabio Franchini, Jian Cui, Luigi Amico, Heng Fan, Mile Gu, +Vladimir Korepin, +Leong Chuan Kwek, and +Vlatko Vedral

it appeared in Phys. Rev. X 4, 041028 - http://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041028 ‪and was published #openaccess

Here's their abstract. 

"In some many-body systems, certain ground-state entanglement (Rényi) entropies increase even as the correlation length decreases. This entanglement nonmonotonicity is a potential indicator of nonclassicality. In this work, we demonstrate that such a phenomenon, known as lack of local convertibility, is due to the edge-state (de)construction occurring in the system. To this end, we employ the example of the Ising chain, displaying an order-disorder quantum phase transition. Employing both analytical and numerical methods, we compute entanglement entropies for various system bipartitions (A|B) and consider ground states with and without Majorana edge states. We find that the thermal ground states, enjoying the Hamiltonian symmetries, show lack of local convertibility if either A or B is smaller than, or of the order of, the correlation length. In contrast, the ordered (symmetry-breaking) ground state is always locally convertible. The edge-state behavior explains all these results and could disclose a paradigm to understand local convertibility in other quantum phases of matter. The connection we establish between convertibility and nonlocal, quantum correlations provides a clear criterion of which features a universal quantum simulator should possess to outperform a classical machine."

#quantumPhysics  

An argument that life didn't start here on Earth

First we had water on Mars. Oh yeah, and then the speculation of 'alien mega structures' [1]. And now a seemingly unrelated track, "a bold discovery that reexamines when life on this planet originated [2]". No less: 300 million years earlier than thought! I wanted to chime in and recall a different chain of arguments that's even more delightful if I do say so. Oh and this chain might just relate all of this stuff (except for the mega structures unfortunately). Let's get started.

We are talking about something so prevalent, coming in all forms and appearing in the most adverse conditions this planet has to offer. Life. And still, regardless of your definition of intelligence, we humans stand out. The definition I'll use is all about that ability our species has to harness nature to create computers. And now we find ourselves in a world teaming with life. But we also find ourselves totally alone here, as being significantly more intelligent than all the other life forms. We're at a tea party with adorable teddy bears.

But what if I asked you if “intelligence fills an evolutionary niche or is it an anomaly?” Its uniqueness here on Earth does not satisfactorily answer this question. How common do you think life is in the absolutely unimaginable vastness of the cosmos? If you have a few minutes to spare, you can read about Fermi's paradox which puts a few equations to the question, 'where is everybody?' [5]. I have something to add over there, but we'll save that for a rainy day.

Back to our story. Here's something we all have a notion of. Knowledge begets knowledge. It makes perfect sense. The more we as a species learn the more we continue to learn. But how fast does our total knowledge grow? It's hard to answer this question precisely but we can instead quantify the complexity of our machines. We have built computer chips and then used these to build better ones. The process continues even today. The complexity of these generations of computer chips doubles in less than every two years. And it has done this since we started this game. Computer chips beget computer chips, and they get better and better. This exponential growth in the number of transistors used in generations of computer chips is given a slick name, Moore's law, after Gordon Moore who first pointed this out.

There's a fancy trick scientists like to pull out of their scientist hats sometimes. It's called a log plot. It's a way to draw rapidly growing graphs. On a log plot, the complexity of our computer chips is a simple straight line as time progresses from the left across the page. The image attached to this little story came from ref. [4]. It's a log plot too.

Here's what it means. It plots the complexity of the genetic code of life as it evolved. Geneticists extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

With computer chips or anything else, you could take a smaller window of time and extrapolate backwards and get a very good estimate of when we just started making computers. And if you examine this large jump, it's just such a big jump. How could this be?

Well here's where the title of this tale enters the fray. You see, the theory is then that life started elsewhere. Perhaps frozen and travelling here in comets. It's a twisted tale with a cold start and a warm ending. And one that might put that recent finding that seems to state that life evolved even more rapidly than previously thought into perspective.
Perhaps the key building blocks found their way to this planet. But if this is the case, wouldn't we then expect life to be very wide spread. But what about intelligence?

Will intelligent species be just as shockingly unique as they are here on earth?

=== references ===

[1] Has Kepler Discovered an Alien Megastructure?, http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/has-kepler-discovered-an-alien-megastructure-151014.htm

[2] Life May Have Started 300 Million Years Earlier Than Thought, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/life-may-have-started-300-million-years-earlier-than-thought/

[3] Moore's law, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

[4] Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life, http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522866/best-of-2013-moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/

[5] Fermi paradox, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Subscribe if interested!

Our YouTube channel is now live! Please let your friends know so they too can now connect to a true first of its kind.

We went with a general name due to the fact the the Izvor marital arts and the Volk tactical school are not well known (yet!) outside of Russia. The channel will be featuring a lot of never-before-seen content from my research adventures in Russia and our new commitment and collaboration to create an access point for these arts, in English.

We're kicking things off with the two videos I posted last week on facebook. And there's a lot more to come :)

‪#MartialArts 

Izvor martial arts + Volk tactical close distance course highlights (1/2).

15 November 2015, Moscow 

Training highlights from Sundays Izvor-Volk seminar

On Sunday Михаил Грудев and +Денис Ряузов  put together a course at Volk gym headquarters in Moscow Russia. I had a great time!

The real stars are Ann Zenina who filmed the event and +Lusa Zeglova  who made this highlights clip. Thank you!

‪‬ #Izvor #Volk #MartialArts  

The 'Sambo Lock' Submission from Catch Wrestling  --- shown by Louie Earle

Submission grappling involves putting the opponent into a joint lock, choke or hold such that they can't escape. So they have to tap to avoid being permanently damaged. Many of these locks are really clever. Like a human jigsaw puzzle.

These days the most common grappling style comes from Brazil (Brazilian Jujutsu [2]). It was originally based on Japanese Jujutsu which has many joint locks, arms bars and grappling techniques.
In recent years, another style of grappling has seen a lot of interest, called 'Catch Wrestling' [1]. It's good stuff and there are some differences in the approach so everyone is excited to take a look at it. It was developed in Britain around 1870 and later popularized by the wrestlers of travelling funfairs who developed their own submission holds. They'd travel around and wrestle for money, trying to submit every challenger in each city.

Last month in Moscow, Louie showed some very interesting submissions. I wanted to share this and thank him. Enjoy.

=== references ===

[1] Catch wrestling, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_wrestling

[2] Brazilian Jujutsu, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_jiu-jitsu

#MartialArts  

Quantum Chemistry Simulations on a Quantum Computer

Simulating quantum chemistry, is hailed by many as one leading candidate application of future quantum computers. Recently Nikolaj Moll, Andreas Fuhrer, Peter Staar and Ivano Tavernelli have uploaded a paper to the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04048v1) titled,

'Optimizing Qubit Resources for Quantum Chemistry Simulations in Second Quantization on a Quantum Computer'

I've yet to read their paper past the abstract. But I plan to. Maybe others are interested too?

Here's the abstract

"Quantum chemistry simulations on a quantum computer suffer from the overhead needed for encoding the fermionic problem in a bosonic system of qubits. By exploiting the block diagonality of a fermionic Hamiltonian, we show that the number of required qubits can be reduced by a factor of two or more. There is no need to go into the basis of the Hilbert space for this reduction because all operations can be performed in the operator space. The scheme is conceived as a pre-computational step that would be performed on a classical computer prior to the actual quantum simulation. We apply this scheme to reduce the number of qubits necessary to simulate both the Hamiltonian of the two-site Fermi-Hubbard model and the hydrogen molecule. Both quantum systems can then be simulated with a two-qubit quantum computer."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04048v1

#spnet