adam.oliner.net

I am under the impression that my workstation at IBM, named Turing, is, in fact, a quantum computer. I was led to this conclusion by the observation that doing the same thing twice does not always return the same result. For example, I used Matlab to graph a data set. Looked at the graphs, closed them, then graphed them again. Different graphs. Additionally, there seems to be some program running on this machine that changes my files without my knowledge. I try to cvs commit a file with Eclipse, and it says the file that’s open doesn’t reflect the file system. I have to refresh, update (because the files in the repository have also been suspiciously changed even though no one else has touched them), and then commit before the files are changed again. I have consulted Information Systems and a Red Hat Linux expert. They have no idea what’s going on.

While I am aware of a number of proposed benefits [pdf] of a probabilistic computational model, I assure you that, for most tasks, determinism is very much desired.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2003 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.