09:30 - 10:30 | Tue 5 Jul | Pentland | P1.1
Since Marconi demonstrated the feasibility of radio transmissions, researchers have endeavoured to fulfil the dream of flawless wireless multimedia telecommunications, creating the impression of telepresence - at the touch of a dialling key. However, making this dream a reality required 'quantum' leaps both in digital signal processing and in its nano-electronics based implementation, facilitated by advances in science both in Edinburgh and farther afield. This process has been fuelled by a huge consumer market. Moore's law has indeed prevailed since he outlined his empirical rule-of-thumb in 1965, but based on this the scale of integration is set to depart from classical physics obeying the well-understood rules revealed by science and enter into a new world, where the traveller has to obey the sometimes strange new rules of the quantum-world. The quest for quantum-domain communication solutions was inspired by Feynman's revolutionary idea in 1985: particles such as photons or electrons might be relied upon for encoding, processing and delivering information.
During the last three decades researchers and engineers often considered a pair of open problems. Firstly, classic systems relying on the efficient processing capability of quantum-search algorithms were considered in the area of quantum-assisted communications, while the branch of quantum domain communications relies on quantum channels.
In wireless communications we often encounter large-scale search problems, some of which may be efficiently solved with the aid of bio-inspired random guided algorithms or quantum search techniques. For example, Grover's algorithm is capable of searching through an N-element data-base with the aid of