Preface

• design a three-dimensional, easily distributed, quantum virtual machine (QVM) according to a list of desiderata gathered from the literature and consistent with established axioms of quantum information processing (QIP);
• permit the QVM to evolve completely autonomously-starting from random sequences-or through the intervention of human participants;
• implement a change management/build/test system for systematic exploration of alternate QVMs so the modeled ecology is as natural as possible; and,
• solicit CPU time and human ingenuity over the Internet to ensure that any putative QIP advantage-or lack of advantage-is not an artifact of my personal ability or computational resources.

In this work, and somewhat informally, I define the complexity of the QVM to be equal to the length, in bits, of a compact classical description of its state. This complexity measure, at least for the QVM proposed, seems to escape some of the philosophical problems that plague, essentially, identical measures for a classical (virtual machine) ecology. The verification of this claim-through experiment or proof-presents an intriguing avenue of research...