Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Kowalski, Jim.
Industry forecast of exponential growth in quantum computing power still predicts that transformative applications are decades away. System performance is limited by decoherence and requires 5-10x the number of physical qubits per effective qubit.
JPL is responsible for many space missions, as part of NASA's continuing unmanned exploration of the solar system. Signals from spacecraft at planetary distances arrive at Earth with poor S/N ratio. To reduce errors, the signals are encoded with an inner code of Viterbi encoding. One of the key parameters of Viterbi encoding is the constraint length. Previous space missions have used a constraint length of 7. Newer missions use 15, to give a considerably improved error correction ability. However, the complexity of the Viterbi decoder is increased so as to be 256 times more complex.