Tag: teams

This Site Ranks Youth Hockey Teams, Even for 9-Year-Olds

Laurent

It was after midnight in the center of a November week, and Neil Lodin, the founder of MYHockey Rankings, was hunched around a personal computer in his sparsely furnished household place of work, feeding the beast.

The results of extra than 10,000 youth hockey video games had arrive in around the weekend and awaited acceptance. Lodin wanted to delete duplicates, take care of complaints and check out for statistical anomalies. Most of all, he had to rank teams.

Lodin, 54, toiled in suburban Indianapolis. His son, Ian Lodin, 27, experienced been getting ready the internet site for several hours from his condominium 360 miles absent in Pittsburgh. They labored in silence, help save for the clacking of their keyboards, to update their weekly rankings of approximately 13,000 touring youth hockey groups spanning age groups from 9 to 18.

By dawn on Wednesday, throngs of youth hockey coaches, moms and dads and gamers would be on line, keen for what the Lodins would serve up.

“There are people today all over the nation who chat about they or their youngsters receiving up on Wednesday mornings and examining the rankings,” explained Neil Lodin, a previous pc programmer who created the algorithm that powers his internet site.

MYHockey Rankings — now as a great deal a section of North American youth hockey as warm chocolate and hand heaters — has been called a salvation by coaches who depend on it to assistance them program games towards teams at about the exact amount of talent. Scouts use it to detect groups to look at.

Detractors, including a blogger who named MYHockey Rankings “the worst web page for youth hockey … ever,” complain that the rankings gas the parent-pushed lifestyle of the sport and emphasize successful above player enhancement.

“These rankings are as close to biblical as you can maybe get on a youth hockey scale,” reported Sean Green, who coaches a squirt team (9- and 10-year-olds) for the Allegheny Badgers exterior Pittsburgh. Still, he said, the rankings can be damaging. “Development need to be important, but the problem is as soon

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Two Chinese teams claim to have reached primacy with quantum computers

Laurent
The Pan team’s optical quantum computer uses a 144-mode interferometer to solve a Gaussian boson sampling problem with a factor-of-1024 speedup in computational time relative to a classical computer. Credit: Chao-Yang Lu/University of Science and Technology of China, via Physics

Two teams in China are claiming that they have reached primacy with their individual quantum computers. Both have published the details of their work in the journal Physical Review Letters.

In the computer world, quantum primacy is the performance of calculations that are not feasible on conventional computers—others use the term “quantum advantage.”

Over the past several years, several teams working with quantum computers have claimed to have reached primacy, but thus far have been met with skepticism due to questions about whether the algorithm used was the best choice possible, including the one used by Google. In this new effort, both teams are claiming that their computers leave no room for doubt.

Both of the teams in these new efforts were working at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China, and both were led by physicist Jian-Wei Pan, who has become well known for his work with quantum entanglement.

In both efforts, the goal was to build a quantum computer capable of calculating the output probabilities of quantum circuits—a task that is relatively simple for a conventional computer to perform when there are just a few inputs and outputs. It grows increasingly difficult as the numbers rise until it becomes unfeasible.

In the first effort, the researchers used a photonic approach in building their computer. To tackle the problem of estimating output probabilities, the team used Gaussian boson sampling as a way to analyze the output. In this case, output from a 144-mode interferometer. Under this scenario, there could be 1043 possible outcomes. The researchers claim their machine was capable of sampling the output 1023 times as fast as a supercomputer, which, they further claim, shows quantum primacy.

The second effort involved creating a superconductor-based computer that was capable of calculating using 66 qubits—only 56 of

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