BGU Department of Mechanical Engineering researchers Dr. Daniel Moskovich and Dr. Avishy Carmi have invented a new graphical language for information and computation. The article, "Tangle Machines," has made the cover of the latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society A (pictured above).
Whereas modern people communicate using words and sentences, the ancient Inca also communicated using quipus or `talking knots'. Moskovich and Carmi asked, "What ideas can in fact be expressed using knots and tangled colored pieces of string?" The answer they reveal is original and surprising. Colored decorated tangles can express the fusion of information and the flow of computational processes in a compact and intrinsic way.
This innovative language not only expresses what could be said before, but it also provides tools to convey new ideas. Tangled strings are flexible and can be shifted about. The action of moving strands mirrors the process of switching between different information flows to "achieve the same goal" but at different costs. From amongst these the "best" way to achieve that goal can be selected. This concept might be used in the future to design efficient computational systems, or conversely to mask the workings of a secret computation. In particular it may be applicable in quantum computation, a new and developing paradigm.
Beyond potential practical uses, Moskovich and Carmi's work is exciting because it may open the door to a new research field- the topology of information- focusing on qualitative aspects of the theory of information.
Proceedings of the Royal Society A is a descendant of the world's oldest scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which began publishing in 1665. Many celebrated names in science have published their research in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, including Paul Dirac, Francis Crick and James Watson, Werner Heisenberg, James Clerk Maxwell, Ernest Rutherford, and Erwin Schroedinger.
Moskovich and Carmi are also members of the Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology, directed by Prof. Ron Folman. The primary focus of the Center is on building practical quantum communication systems.
