Prizem Part 2: The Lazarus Instruction
The Lazarus Instruction was the last true innovation mankind ever made.
On December 28, 2031, Dr. Aseejh Randu defined what would later be named the “Lazarus” instruction, defined by it’s opcode laz. At that time, the implementation was merely theoretical. Outside of a small group of researchers, most were completely unaware the theory even existed. Though the logic was sound, any actual implementation seemed so far from possibility that some even discarded it as a form of “whitepaper science-fiction”.
Like most true innovations, it was more chance than anything. “Right place, right time, I guess.” Randu later remarked.
He and Dr. Abraham Perelman had been full-time at Prizem Group, the research company they’d co-founded, for about six years. Thanks to their, as the Prizem website biography put it, “independent” funding structure, they’d spent a lot of that time on a lot of different projects that ultimately amounted to a junk drawer. It may have been a junk drawer full of rough-cut gems, but without further refinement most of their ideas were never implemented beyond prototypes.
“Having the freedom to self-direct my research leads me down some pretty deep rabbit holes. I spin up the occasional proof-of-concept, but I’m mostly just researching everything I can about everything,” wrote Perelman on a blog post dated 2029. “Our goals are completely self-motivated. There’s no audience to present your work to. There’s no curtain reveal. For the most part, we really put the ‘independent’ into the term ‘independent researcher’. I actually thought for a while there Ash had stopped working on the project entirely, I’d see him once every six months and he was always on some philosophical mind-trip. Fortunately he’s been coming in a lot more often recently, so I’ve had a lot of fun showing off some of my prototypes. He brings some really interesting ideas and perspectives into our work. He’s asking some really profound questions. Questions, I think may hold the answer to ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything’. If anyone can figure it out, he can.”
Late on a chilly November evening, while laying in bed next to his sleeping wife, Abraham Perelman scrolled across a post on Hacker News titled “DIY 10-qbit processor”. It had 3 up votes.
Intrigued, he clicked the post, which was a link to a YouTube video of the same title with 12 views. It was a roughly 2 minute completely silent video that depicted a monstrosity of wires on the desk inside a residential home. There were 10 lights, blinking in what appeared to be a mostly random order. What was strange was that any time he’d look at any of the lights individually, it would stop blinking. He replayed the video - it wasn’t always consistent, but it was uncanny to say the least.
Fully hooked now, he explored the uploader’s channel - a user by the name of “Shadow the Hedgehog21” with a picture of, predictably, Shadow the Hedgehog as the avatar. There were only two other uploads. One video uploaded a few years prior was titled “black belt”. It was a 12 second phone recording of a child breaking a board with a heel kick with more confidence than his otherwise childlike demeanor would boast. The more recent upload was titled “CHS Robotics” and showed a group of high-school aged students practicing piloting a robot doing various tasks, such as lifting tennis balls into a basket, or navigating a maze. In one case two robots were going head-to-head in a death match.
Perelman double-checked the upload date and compared it to the quantum processor upload. “Holy crap. This kid’s still in high school?” Perelman asked the quiet, dark bedroom. “Abe it’s 3am and the epiphany’s are killing me. Go to sleep.” his wife Becky scolded as she cuddled into him. “Okay okay. Just one more thing” Abe replied as his finger hit the “send” button and drifted to sleep.
By the time Perelman had a chance to log back into his workstation a few days later, he had an email waiting. “Re: DIY 10-qbit quantum processor” from Rostam Ahmadi, <[email protected]>. It read:
Dear Mr. Pearlman,
Yes, I have built this in my room by myself. The gas company wouldn’t deliver enough enough liquid helium to cool a regular super-conducting QPU, I decided to build it with a kind of similar approach as the neutral atom architecture. I was able to get it to work using big electromagnets I made from transformers out of microwaves I found in the trash. Don’t tell my dad, he will ground me if he knows I’ve been playing with transformers again! Burning my eyebrow off didn’t even hurt, he just freaked out because of the smell.
I’m still in 7th grade but I have completed all the high-school classes they’ll let me take, except for the one I kicked out of. My parents are too busy to drive me to a farther school and the cops said I’m too young still to stay at home by myself, but I think the teachers kind of prefer it when I skip class. Plus, I get to work on way more interesting stuff like this!
Sincerely,
Shadow The Hedgehog21
Born in Mashhad, Iran, Rostam Ahmadi was the only child of two hydroelectrical engineers. As an infant, he remembered hearing his parents discuss the new dam they met while working on. They both loved their careers, and were quite skilled. Often bringing their work home to the dinner table, Rostam learned to read data sheets before he could walk.
Later, he became an “iPad kid” but instead of computer animated nursery rhyme videos, he read the Wikipedia articles for abstract mathematical concepts. Having two parents who were both excelling in their careers meant Rostam had a lot of free time to himself, which he dedicated to teaching himself anything he thought he should know. By the time he entered public school, young Rostam had a working knowledge quantum mechanics and could write LaTeX fluently.
The young Ahmadi family’s life would be disrupted as the result of two significant events. First, in 2016 the Iranian government began a process of transferring much of the state-owned power grid to private for-profit companies. Second, the Ahmadi family became followers of the Baháʼí faith. One day in 2029, when it was made clear that neither situation would be allowed to continue, the family was forced to apply for emergency religious asylum in the United States and join some of their relatives who had also converted. With the extensive career experience his parents had, they were quickly placed into demanding roles within power infrastructure projects within the greater Bay Area of San Francisco, California.
Fitting in at school wasn’t too difficult. Many of his peers were also children of first-generation skilled immigrants. Rostam particularly thrived in the after-school robotics club his middle school offered. He was naturally skilled, but he also had a knack for leadership and was able to help inspire his classmates to excel.
When Rostam told his parents that a man from his YouTube channel wanted to come look something in his bedroom, there was some justifiable alarm.
Perelman tried to persuade Randu to go with him to look at what the kid had built, but Randu simply replied “I’m bad at the mushy stuff and you’re even worse. Get Bec to go with you.”
“I’d love to go with you!”, Abraham’s wife of 14 years Becky replied when he filled her in on the situation. “My student teacher is excellent, she can take over for a day or two while we explore the coast!” After a nice retreat through Half-Moon bay with a stop at the U.C. Santa Cruz’s Grateful Dead archive, they returned up to San Jose to meet at the Ahmadi home.
As they sat in the family’s sparsely decorated living room, Abe thought Rostam’s father must have been sick - his face was colorless and expressionless. There was no movement in him at all for the entire discussion other than profuse amounts of sweat beading down his forehead. Rostam’s mother was slightly more relaxed, but it was clear neither of them had any clue what was happening. After a brief introduction and overview of what Prizem Group was working on, the father suddenly regained the color in his face.
“You mean there’s no problem?”
“Sir, not only is there no problem, I’m hoping your son can help me with some of mine.” replied Abraham. “Becky and I have talked it over, she is an experienced educator and is already operating a registered and accredited company school for our kids and a few others. It’s one of the primary focus areas of Prizem Group. We’d like to have him come attend as a ‘foreign-exchange student’, and I’d like to hire him as an intern at Prizem. Of course, the first thing we’ll is formalize and open source his existing research on electromagnetic quantum registers.”
“Are you talking about that thing in his room? Has he been plugging it in again? That thing quadrupled our electricity bill! I told him he will pay that back to me with a paper route.” Rostam’s father rebutted, unconvinced.
Abraham continued “Actually we’d also like to buy that machine outright, and I’m more than happy to take care of any outstanding debts young Mr. Ahmadi has accumulated.”
It took some convincing, but the decision was left up to Rostam. With the amount of money he was making from the sale of the prototype he’d built from literal garbage, he’d have plenty of money to do pretty much whatever he wanted for the rest of his life. Why not give this a shot? The whole “mission” of Prizem sounded more interesting to work on than robots, but he was told being captain of the school robotics team would be one of his first responsibilities.
On the morning December 27, 2031, after attending an impromptu lecture and demonstration on “quantum electromagnetic computing” from the young Mr. Rostam Ahmadi, Dr. Aseejh Randu would retire to his office once again, pondering a deep implication. Randu had been toying with a RISC-V implementation. “I was trying to learn how a computer actually works.” he would later recount to a group of students.
The Born rule is a postulate of quantum mechanics that gives the probability that a measurement of a quantum system will yield a given result. In one commonly used application, it states that the probability density for finding a particle at a given position is proportional to the square of the amplitude of the system’s wavefunction at that position. It was formulated and published by German physicist Max Born in July 1926.
- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
The idea ran through Aseejh’s head like a shock strong enough to singe an eyebrow. “What if we implemented the Borne rule in hardware?”, he asked himself.
Quickly, he simulated a crude approximation of the hardware in SPICE, an open source circuit simulator he’d spent a summer learning. It “worked”. The necessary quantum bits were simply hard-coded to known values, but it simulated correctly.
“Assuming this kid’s quantum computer works the way we think it does, this could actually work,” he said as he slapped a copy of his draft definition on Abe’s desk the next morning.
“…what am I looking at here, Ash? Help me out,” Abe replied, hopefully. “And ‘Hey Oasis’ let’s get Rostam in here to hear this as well”.
“On it, Abe,” replied the computerized voice of “Oasis”- their crude attempt at a ‘digital assistant’, strung together with a handful of open source large language models.
“I’ve been able to implement the Born postulate as a hardware register, defined as a simple extension to the existing open source RISC-V architecture”, Assejh explained. “I’ve defined a new opcode, laz, which places the state of the entire computer in a superposition and returns the most likely next instruction.”
“…the ‘most likely next instruction’?” Abraham inquired. “Wouldn’t that just be the next instruction in the program? Why is that important? We already know the next instruction.”
Rostam walked in the room. “That’s only if you’re running a traditional program. If we started writing programs that relied on this register to tell us what to do, things might get interesting,” he answered. “I had Oasis patch me in an audio feed of the room as soon as you asked it to get me. Pretty slick!”
“Right on, kid!” Randu replied without missing a beat. He’d initially been skeptical of all this “intern” business, but he’d learned to trust his partner and this time was already paying off.
Perelman inquired further, “Okay, so we have the computer tell us what program to run? What’s to say it will do anything useful at all? What do you expect to happen when you turn the wheel over to the CPU?”
“Great question! I don’t know. Would you like to find out?” Randu humbly replied.
“I’m in! One question- what’s up with laz?” Rostam answered enthusiastically.
“Honestly, it initially was a placeholder for ‘lazy’, because I was too lazy to name it something better,” Randu answered. “However, as I worked on it, my mind kept returning to Lazarus, from the New Testament in the Bible. This is an implementation of the ‘Born’ postulate. Lazarus had been dead in his tomb for four days when Jesus commanded him to ‘come forth’. Before doing so, he told the people ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live’. When Lazarus came out of the tomb, he was literally ‘born again’. Not only physically as he was brought back to life, but spiritually as he accepted Jesus Chris as his only salvation. As I worked, laz took on the meaning of to ‘come forth’ to me, so I kept it. Writing a laz instruction is literally telling the processor to ‘come forth.’ If the computer does what I think it might do when we tell it to do that, we might have something pretty big on our hands.”
“You’ll get used to that,” Abraham remarked to Rostam. “How do we get started?”
“First, I want to take a really close look at that computer Rostam brought in yesterday,” Randu answered.
FOUND RESOURCES:
| RISC-V RV32Q (Quantum Extension) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Inst. | Name | Description (C) |
laz |
Predict next instruction |
rd = |ψ(imm1)|² |
| Availaible Fall '31 exclusively from Prizem Group, LLC. | ||