This sounds like a quantum version of the 50(?)-year-old "synchronizer circuit" problem. The classical synchronizer problem has to do with designing a digital circuit that can unambiguously decide who gets a shared resource -- e.g., a common data bus -- when two subsystems ask for it "at the same time". The situation occurs in computer I/O systems, where two "independent" subsystems (those that don't share a common clock) have to send data over a common I/O channel and a synchronizer circuit has to decide which subsystem goes first, since the system malfunctions if they both try to access the bus at the same time. In the classical solution, as the timing of the two subsystems becomes closer and closer, the amount of time that it takes the synchronizer to decide which subsystem came first takes longer and longer. In the worst (measure zero) case, it takes an infinite amount of time to decide, and the overall digital system fails to respond at all. One might have thought that quantum systems could avoid this synchronizer problem by having the quantum system "decide" by flipping a coin. But it sounds like the quantum system does something even worse -- it goes into a superposition of states in which each subsystem thinks it got the resource first. At 02:11 AM 10/3/2012, Eric Angelini wrote:
Hello Math-fun,
I've received this interesting press release yesterday and would like to share it with you today (or the contrary?) Best, Ã.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-10/uov-qcr100212.php