Decision delaying and quantum computing

beautiful Schrödinger equation

The cat

A common and didactic story is told when someone is learning quantum mechanics - the Schrödinger's cat. It says that the nature of things is so that if a given entity has different possible states then combinations of them are also possible states. To illustrate this sentence we say that an radioactive atom, which is tested and accepted to be governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, is used as a trigger to release poison into a closed box when it changes its state. We also put into that box a cat that was certainly alive. The interesting part is that, if an atom could be in both states at the same time, and we assume that the cat could be in two states - dead or alive, then the cat could also be in both states at the same time.


The Truth 


This was really amusing for me, and helped a lot when I decided to go to graduate on Physics. The mind twisting idea is that is not that we are ignorant and don't now if he is dead or not, in fact it is pretty defined. It's part of many cultures the idea that we must have a "better answer" because we want the facts, we want the truth. But as Colonel Jessep stated, we can't handle it, our ego expect a behavior that nature will slap us in the face, but it will give us what we expect from it, because we don't see dead-alive cat states around that much.


Qubits 


What happens is that when we open the box we make a measurement, and we say that the state collapses and we make nature decided which one is it. Note that we destroyed information, and not discovered it. Which is a bit counter intuitive, but that principle is so powerful that in fact that it is in the core of quantum computing, by not making nature to chose and to truncate information into a human readable state, we use the exponential amount of possibilities to solve problems.


So What?


The thing that made me write this post was related to agile methods, and as the tittle says is related with delaying decisions, which is the practice of making decisions until the last responsible moment, to only deciding things when we really need that decision. A cute analogy is obvious, but what really amused me is that commonly we encourage our selfs to do it but we don't really accept a Schrödinger's cat when we see one, we keep making measurements and forcing a "valid" idea. If our brain is governed by the same laws, I wonder if the creative thinking part of our job is our quantum computer that is constantly being sabotaged by our intrusive and dogmatic ego that keeps opening the dam box.