Science Communication Challenge

One of the activities on the second day of the workshop is a science communication challenge, where participants will use the Up-Goer Five text editor to create texts related to quantum information science and technology, written in simple language using only the ten hundred most commonly used words. The texts will be collected via a Google Form distributed during the workshop session. Images can also be uploaded to the form as part of the submission. Below we have included examples of possible texts written in the Up-Goer Five text editor, as well as an example of a diagram only containing words allowed by the text editor.

Example 1: Simple description of quantum mechanics and how it can be used in technology

Strange things can happen like being in two states at once and talking to something far away. If you try to look at what state something is in, you will change the state! As you know, this doesn't usually happen in day-to-day life. We can use strange things like this to make computers better at some jobs and to send things in a safer way.

Example 2: Description of distributed quantum computing

Normal computers use bits, which can be one or nothing. I am working on a type of computer that uses a strange new type of bit that can be one, nothing, or a bit of both. That is not all, though. The type of computer I work with is made from several smaller parts that together form a whole with more power and memory. Each part is a computer in its own right, but it is hard to make one computer with enough of the strange type of bits that we need to make the strange new type of computer we care about do things that have any real use. This is because on one computer, the strange bits want to talk to one another too much. They are like a big crowd in too small a room all talking with each other. They are too close not to get in each other's way and it is hard to hear others with so many talking at once. If people on far ends of the room from one another want to talk, they have to talk to people between them and pass on what they have to say. Do you think that what they have to say will be right by the end?

With what I suggest, we instead use many smaller rooms to hold the same number of people without them getting in each other's way so much. That way, everyone can be heard, and everyone has space to work. If they need something from a different room, they send someone with one job – to pass on what people in their room say to another room.

In our case, the people going from room to room may still get what they should say wrong. We must not use too many people going between rooms but also must not make the rooms too big to get around this. If we did, we would have a big crowd again. I try to find out how many people we can have going from room to room and how big the rooms can be before what we want to say is lost.

Example 3: Diagram describing twin-field quantum key distribution

Below we have added the submissions we received from the participants for the Science Communication Challenge.

Quantum Communications/Quantum Key Distribution

1) Tiny things that make up light can be in more than one state at a time. When we watch them they pick one of these states, and we have a piece of a key. Then we have more tiny light things, and more pieces for our key. Our key is safe from bad people, because if bad people watch our tiny light things, we can know about it. This is how we can have safe key sharing for computers.

2) We would like to let two guys talk in a right way and hope only them can get the full right words. Then we find a way to get the right words from wrong words and only let them talk with the wrong words. Since only they can understand the wrong words, the talk can be understood by them in a right way and no one else can understand the talk always.

3) Light is made-up of lots of of tiny bits that can not be broken into anything smaller. You can send news/talk using flashing light. Instead of using big flashes made of lots of light bits we can use flashes only made by one bit of light. This means that they can be used to talk without anyone listening, as they can't be broken into anything smaller, so if anyone takes the bits to listen to them you can tell as they are now missing, and so you know to stop talking.

4) Phoning someone using a box in space

We want to talk to people who are far away in a safe way. It’s easy to talk to them if we send light to the box in space. Usually, bad people can hear you talk. But there is a better way, if you have lots of control of your light. So much so that you can send single bits of light at a time. Because we have only single bits of light, if the bad person tries to listen in, they leave a mark. So it is obvious to the good people that the bad people are listening in. The good people can then just start again and everything is safe.

5) When we talk, our words are safe. At least for now. With new computers this will change. We need to change how we share our words, so they remain safe.

These new computers use amazing stuff and things that change the way we look at talking, and make it strange. We can use weird light to make our words safe again.

This doesn't make us safe from bad people. Bad people can ignore the safe words, and go after the good people. By hitting the good people, the words can still be taken. This shows that we will never have perfect, safe, words. What is the point of trying to have perfect, safe, words if people are always a problem?

There will always be problems outside of the sharing of safe words. We can't just take it that we can always be the best safe.

We just need to do the best we can.

6) If we keep doing the same hiding step when it comes to safe talk with people that are far away, there is a chance that two people will no longer be able to tell if they are talking to each other as computers and their power goes up along the next years. No safe talk for anyone far away from each other will be possible.

That is why we have to change the way we hide the far away conversations between people.

One way to do that is by changing the way the conversations are hid. Making it harder for the computer when it comes to find.

A different way is to change the hiding step completely by sharing.

*7) Let’s say that you and your friend want to talk without bad people listening.

Imagine you talk through a magic space box which makes keys and safe.

You throw your letter throw it into the magic space box. It then makes a safe and puts letter in it and drops onto your friend. Box makes two keys which only you and your friend have and open safe.

Friend can then open safe and read letter. If a bad guy watched the box and tried to make the key and got close, he could try and open safe but fail leaving a mark on lock.

If mark too big then can repeat and make safer.

8) What's the most crazy idea you have ever heard? Cars in space? Housing deep under-water? We do not do that stuff. What we do is really simple. Make sure that a group of people talk to each other. That's it. Well, a little more — their words need to be as different as possible. Well, not words, but their meaning. Actually not for them, but for others. I mean anyone.

But you get the crazy idea. You want to order dinner, but make sure no one knows about it. Well not you having dinner, but just what you had for dinner. For people who have dinner by themselves, this is not a problem. But let's not go away from the matter at hand.

Actually forget that. I am into cars in space these days.

*9) There were once two people from a village, a man and a woman, fishing on a calm sea that was a hundred hundred steps long and hundred hundred steps wide. They could only return to the village once they had caught ten fish, so they fished far from one another so that they could catch as many as they could. At lunch time, they would ask each other how much fish they had caught but they were too far away to hear each other and too far to see each other.

So on their break, the Man would strike the water for every fish he had caught and the Woman would strike the water for every fish she had caught. If they had reached ten, they would go home early.

One day, a fish in the sea caught wind of this. This fish was ten steps long and as old as the sea itself. When it was lunch time, he would stop the waves from the Man and strike the surface of the water with his huge head. One, two, three... The fish would tell the Man and Woman that the other had caught ten fish. They would go home early and his friends would live another day. The people of the village however, would have no food.

At first, the Man and Woman were angry with each other. Soon however, they understood that it must have been the fish. They made a plan. They would throw stones across the sea, five stones for five fish caught. The Woman and the Man would pick stones from the beach that have a color and a shape. They would remember this and ignore any other color and shape.

When the fish tried to stop the stones and throw his own, the Man and Woman could see that they came from him as they would always have a different shape and color. No matter what the fish tried, he could only stop the stones and never get the Man and Woman to be angry at each other again. The people of the village were well fed from then on!

Single-Photon Sources

*10) I work with a rare kind of light-making thing. It does not make a lot of light but instead kicks out little bits of light like kicking out single balls. No two balls can ever be kicked out at the same time. The balls are also funny, they change as soon as you look at them. You can use those balls to tell something to someone without anyone else listening. You write what you want to say on the ball then pass it to the other person. You know that you only sent one ball so no one else has a second ball that is exactly the same. You can also check whether it still looks the same when the other person got it. That way you know that no one else can know what you wanted to say.

11) In my work I look at things which can make light. These things make light in tiny pieces. The tiny pieces of light are not normal light. They can't be smaller than they are already, but each piece is exactly the same. We really like these tiny pieces of light, because they can make our computers faster and help us talk in a safer way. So we want to have something that can make them.

The things that can make tiny pieces of light are also very small themselves. But there is a problem. If these things get hot, they make bad pieces of light. The pieces of light are no longer the same and we can't use them. But it is hard to keep these things very, very cold all the time. So in my work I try to understand what exactly causes the problems when these things get too hot. If we can understand well what happens, maybe we can find a way to make nice, good tiny pieces of light with hot things. This would be very cool!

Quantum Error Correction

12) It is easy to talk to a friend when you are in a quiet room. However, if the room gets busy and a lot louder, it becomes harder to talk with your friend. In fact, sometimes you might not understand what they are saying. That is, there is a fault in your understanding.

The same is true for any type of computer. When a computer runs, faults can happen which, if they are not dealt with, the answer it returns can not be understood. For any computer to be practical, one needs to build ways of dealing with these faults.

People in the world are trying to build a new type of computer, one that runs in a different way to the computers that everyone knows and loves. In my work, I am trying to build new, small, and fast ways of dealing with faults that happen on these amazing new computers.

Connectionless Entanglement Distribution

13) To do cool things we want to share some states. These states are like lines, but throwing them when far away is hard. One way to do it is to throw shorter lines between people in the middle, and then have them join the short lines.

We might be wrong every time we join and make the lines become worse, so we need to fix them somehow. One way is to use several short lines to make a better short line. Then joining is easier and less wrong.

If we talk to the people at the middle points from the start, they can start throwing the lines earlier and joining them, but then they might have to hold the line and be busy. Instead, we can wait to ask them to throw the line until we are ready to join a line close to them, so that everyone else at the middle points can be free to do other things, like throwing lines for other people.

If many people want to share lines at the same time, the second way may be better as a whole, although each line from end to end may take longer to share.

CHSH Game (Entanglement)

14) Imagine a two player game where each player is asked a question and has to answer yes or no. They work together and can talk before the game to agree a plan but once the game begins they are taken to different rooms to make sure they can no longer talk.

In the easy form of the game they come out on top if they both give the same answer. Think about this before reading more - can they always come out on top?

Yes they can. They simply agree they will both say “yes” or both say “no”. Next, in the middle form of the game they are asked red or blue. They come out on top if they gave the same answer when asked the same question and different answers when asked the different questions. So if one is asked red and answers yes, and the other is asked blue and answers no, they come out on top. Again, think if they can always come out on top.

Yes they can. They can agree to answer yes to red and blue to no or the other way round. Finally, in the hard form of the game they are again asked red or blue. Now they come out on top if they give the same answer, except if they are both asked blue in which case they must give different answers. Can they always come out on top now?

Nothing they can agree before will work for every pair of questions. If they always say yes they will come out on top for every pair of questions except blue, blue. So they have a three in four chance of coming out on top.

The strange thing is that if they carefully use very small things they can come out on top with higher chance (about 85%).

Artificial Intelligence

15) Some nice people decided to make a new type of computer. This computer can answer every question the people have. It can answer very hard world problems. People who made it were happy because they do not have to go to work now. The computer started doing every work for them. Years later, this computer got very grown up and started thinking on its own without the people help. The people who have made it now were scared. In hiding, they decided to make another computer but a more happy one this time to fight the first one. The new one was able to let the first one know about 'nice' people and both started working 'with' the people instead of fighting them.

*These submissions use non-permitted words.