This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. Floor Games by H. G. Wells Section 1. The Toys to Have The jolliest indoor games for boys and girls demand a floor. And the home that has no floor upon which games may be played falls so far short of happiness. It must be a floor covered with linoleum or cork carpet, so that toy soldiers and such like will stand up upon it, and of a color and surface that will take and show chalk marks. The common green-colored cork carpet without a pattern is the best of all. It must be no highway to other rooms, and well-lit and airy. Occasionally, alas! it must be scrubbed, and then a truce to floor games. Upon such a floor may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of spacious and inspiring ideas in them for afterlife. The men of tomorrow will gain new strength from nursery floors. I am going to tell of some of these games and what is most needed to play them. I have tried them all, and a score of others like them with my sons, and all of the games here illustrated have been set out by us. I am going to tell of them here because I think what we have done will interest other fathers and mothers, and perhaps be of use to them, and to uncles and such like tributary subspecies of humanity, and buying presents for their own and other people's children. Now, the toys we play with time after time and in a thousand permutations and combinations belong to four main groups. We have, one, soldiers, and with these I-class sailors, railway porters, civilians, and the lower animals generally, such as I will presently describe in greater detail. Two, bricks. Three, boards and planks. And four, a lot of clockwork railway rolling-stock and rails. Also there are certain minor objects, tin ships, Easter eggs, and the like, of which I shall make incidental mention, that like the Kiwi and the Duckbill Platypus refuse to be classified. These we arrange and rearrange in various ways upon our floor, making a world of them. In doing so we have found out all sorts of pleasant facts and also many undesirable possibilities, and very probably our experience will help a reader here and there to the former and save him from the latter. For instance, our planks and boards, and what one can do with them, have been a great discovery. Lots of boys and girls seem to be quite without planks and boards at all, and there is no regular trade in them. The toy shops we found did not keep anything of the kind we wanted, and our boards, which we had to get made by a carpenter, are the basis of half the games we play. The planks and boards we have are of various sizes. We began with three of two yards by one. We were made with cross pieces like small doors, but these we found unnecessarily large, and we would not get them now after our present experience. The best thickness, we think, is an inch for the larger sizes and three-quarters and a half inch for the smaller, and the best sizes are a yard square, thirty inches square, two feet, and eighteen inches square, one or two of each and a greater number of smaller ones, eighteen by nine, nine by nine, and nine by four and a half. With the larger ones we make islands and archipelagos on our floor, while the floor is a sea, or we make a large island or a couple on the Venice pattern, or we pile the smaller on the larger to make hills when the floor is a level plain, or they roof in railway stations or serve as bridges in such manner as I will presently illustrate. And these boards of ours pass into our next most important possession, which is our box of bricks. But I was nearly forgetting to tell this that all the thicker and larger of these boards have holes bored through them.  These holes have their uses, as I will tell later. But now let me get on to the box of bricks. This again wasn't a toy-shop acquisition. It came to us by gift from two generous friends, unhappily growing up in very tall at that, and they had it from parents who were one of several families who shared in the benefit of a good uncle. I know nothing, certainly, of this man, except that he was a Radford of Plymouth. I have never learned nor cared to learn of his commoner occupations, but certainly he was one of those shining and distinguished uncles that tower up at times above the common levels of humanity. At times, when we consider our derived and undeserved share of his inheritance and count the joys it gives us, we have projected half in jest and half in earnest the putting together of a little exemplary book upon the subject of such exceptional men. Celebrated uncles, it should be called, and it should stir up all who read it to some striving at least towards the glories of the avuncular crown. What this great benefactor did was to engage a deserving unemployed carpenter through an entire winter making big boxes of wooden bricks for the almost innumerable nephews and nieces with which an appreciative circle of brothers and sisters that blessed him. There are whole bricks four and a half inches by two and a quarter, by one and an eighth, and there are quarters, called by those previous owners, who have now ascended to, we hope would scarcely believe, a happier life near the ceiling. Piggies! You note how these sizes fit into the sizes of the boards, and of each size we have never counted them, but we must have hundreds. We can pave a dozen square yards of floor with them.  They are too small to make a decent home for even the poorest-led soldiers, even if there were hundreds of them, and there are never enough, never nearly enough. Even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say, this is a house. Even then there are not enough. We see rich people, rich people out of motor-cars, rich people beyond the dreams of avarice, going into toy shops and buying these skimpy, sickly, ridiculous, pseudo-boxes of bricklets, because they do not know what to ask for, and the toy shops are just the merciless mercenary enemies of youth and happiness. So far that is, as bricks are concerned. They're unfortunate under-parented offspring mess about with these gifts and don't make very much of them and put them away. And you see their consequences in afterlife and the weakly-conceived villas and silly suburbs that people have built all round big cities. Such poor, undernourished nurseries must needs fall back upon the Encyclopedia Britannica, and even that is becoming flexible on India paper. But our box of bricks almost satisfies. With our box of bricks we can scheme and build all three of us for the best part of the hour and still have more bricks in the box. So much now for the bricks. I will tell later how we use cartridge paper and cardboard and other things to help in our game and of the decorative make of plasticine. Of course it goes without saying that we despise those foolish, expensive, made-up wooden and paste-board castles that are sold in shops.  Let me now say a little about toy soldiers and the world to which they belong. Toy soldiers used to be flat, small creatures in my own boyhood in comparison with the magnificent beings one can buy today. There has been an enormous improvement in our national physique in this respect. Now they stand nearly two inches high and look you broadly in the face. And they have the movable arms and alert intelligence of scientifically exercised men. You get five of them mounted or nine a foot in a box for a small price. We three like those of British manufacture best. Other makes are of incompatible sizes, and we have a rule that saves much trouble that all redcoats belong to GPW and all other colored coats to FRW. All gifts, bequests, and accidents notwithstanding. Also we have sailors, but since there are no redcoated sailors, blue counts is red. Then we have bee-feeders, footnote. The waters and the Tower of London are called bee-feeders. The origin of the term is obscure. Indians, zulus, for whom there are special rules. We find we can buy lead dogs, cats, lions, tigers, horses, camels, cattle, and elephants of a reasonably corresponding size. And we have also several boxes of railway porters and some soldiers we bought in Hesse-Darmstadt that we pass off on an unsuspecting homeworld as policemen. But we want civilians very badly. We found a box of Germans from an exaggerated curse of militarism, and even the grocer wears epaulets. This might please Lord Roberts and Mr. Leo Maxi, but it certainly does not please us. I wish indeed that we could buy boxes of tradesmen. A blue butcher, a white baker with a loaf of standard bread, a merchant or so, boxes of servants, boxes of street traffic, smart sets, and so forth. We could do with a judge and lawyers, or a box of vestrymen. It is true that we can buy Salvation Army Lasses and football players, but we are cold to both of these. We have, of course, Boy Scouts. With such boxes of civilians we could have much more fun than with the running, marching, swashbuckling soldiery that pervades us. They drive us to reviews, and it is only emperors, kings, and very silly small boys who can take an undying interest in uniforms and reviews. And lastly, of our railways, let me merely remark here that we have always insisted upon one uniform gauge, and everything we buy fits into and develops our existing railway system. Nothing is more indicative of the rambling sort of parent and a coterie of witless, worthless uncles than a heap of railway toys of different gauges and natures in the children's playroom. And so, having told you of the material we have, let me now tell you of one or two games out of the innumerable many that we have played. Of course, in this I have to be a little artificial. Actual games of the Kaimai and illustrating here have been played by us many and many a time with joy and happy invention and no thought of publication. They have gone now, those games, into that vaguely luminous and iridescent world of memories where all love and gendering happiness must go, but we do our best to set them there and recall the good in them here. Section 2 The Game of the Wonderful Islands In this game the floor is the sea. Half, rather the larger half because of some instinctive right of promogenity, is assigned to the elder of my two sons. He is, as it were, its Olympian. And the other half goes to his brother. We distribute our boards about the sea in an archipelagic manner. We then dress our islands, objecting strongly to too close a scrutiny of our proceedings until we have done. Here in the illustration is such an archipelago ready for its explorers or rather on the verge of exploration. There are altogether four islands, two to the reader's right and two to the left, and the nearer ones are the more northerly. It is as many as we could get into the camera. The northern island to the right is most advanced in civilization and is chiefly temple. That temple has a flat roof, diversified by domes made of half easter eggs and cardboard cones. These are surmounted by decorative work of a flamboyant character in Plasticine designed by GPW. An oriental population crowds the courtyard and pours out upon the roadway. Note the grotesque Plasticine monsters guard the portals, also by GPW, who had a free hand with the architecture of this remarkable specimen of eastern religiosity. They are nothing, you may be sure, to the gigantic idols in the side out of the reach of the sacrilegious camera. To the right is a tropical thatched hut. The thatched roof is really that nice ribbed paper that comes round bottles, a priceless boon to these games. All that comes into the house is saved for us. The owner of the hut lounges outside the door. He is a dismounted cavalry courseman and he owns one cow. His fence, I may note, belonged to a little wooden farm we bought in Switzerland. Its human inhabitants are scattered, its beasts follow a precarious living as wild guinea pigs on the islands to the south. Your attention is particularly directed at the trees about and behind the temple, which thicken to a forest on the further island to the right. These trees we make of twigs taken from trees and bushes in the garden and stuck into holes in our boards. Formerly we lived in a house with a little wood close by and our forests were wonderful. Now we are restricted to our garden and we could get nothing for this set out but jasmine and pear. Both have wilted a little and are not nearly such spirited trees as you can make out of fir trees, for instance. It is for these woods chiefly that we have our planks perforated with little holes. No tin trees can ever be so plausible and various and jolly as these. With a good garden to draw upon one can make terrific somber woods and then lie down and look through them at lonely horsemen or wandering beasts. That further island on the right is a less settled country than the island of the temple. Camels, you note, run wild there. There is a sort of dwarf elephant similar to the now extinct kind of which one finds skeletons in Malta. Pigs, a red parrot, and other such creatures of lead and wood. The pear trees are fine. It is those which have attracted white settlers, I suppose they are, whose thatched huts are to be seen both upon the beach and inland. By the huts on the beach lie a number of pear tree logs, but a rate of negroid savages from an adjacent island to the left is in progress. The only settler is the man in a clearly visible rifleman's uniform running inland for help. Beyond, peeping out among the trees, are the supports he seeks. These same negroid savages are as bold as they are ferocious. They cross arms of the sea and their rude canoes made simply of a strip of cardboard. Their own island, the one to the south left, is a rocky wilderness containing caves. Their chief food is the wild goat, but in pursuit of these creatures you will also sometimes find the brown bear. Who sits? He is small but perceptible to the careful student in the mouth of his cave. Here, too, you will distinguish small guinea pig-like creatures of wood. In happier days the inhabitants of that Swiss farm. Sunk and rocks off this island are indicated by a white foam which takes the form of letters and you will also note a whirlpool between the two islands to the right. Finally comes the island nearest to the reader on the left. This also is wild and rocky, inhabited not by negroid blacks, but by Indians, intense, made by FRW out of ordinary brown paper and adorned with chalk totems of a rude and characteristic kind, pour forth their fierce and well-armed inhabitants at the intimation of an invader. The rocks on this island, let me remark, have great mineral wealth. Among them are to be found not only sheets and veins of silver paper, but great nuggets of metal, obtained by the melting down hopelessly broken soldiers in an iron spoon. Note, too, the peculiar and romantic shell beach of this country. It is an island of exceptional interest to the geologist and scientific explorer. The Indians, you observe, have domesticated one leadon and one wooden cow. This is how the game would be set out. Then we build ships and explore these islands, but in these pictures are represented as already arriving. The ships are built out of our wooden bricks on flat keels made of two wooden pieces of nine by four and a half inches, which are very convenient to push about over the floor. Captain GPW is steaming into the bay between the eastern and western islands. He carries heavy guns. His ship bristles with an extremely aggressive soldiery, who appear to be blazing away for the mere love of the thing. I suspect him of imperialist intentions. Captain FRW is apparently at anchor between his northern and southern islands. His ship is of a slightly more pacific type. I note on his deck a lady and a gentleman of German origin. With a bag. Two of our all too rare civilians. No doubt the bag contains samples and a small conversation dictionary in the Nigroid dialects. I think FRW may turn out to be a liberal. Perhaps he will sail on and rescue the raided huts. Perhaps he will land and build a jetty and begin mining among the rocks to fill his hold with silver.  All that is for Captain FRW to decide. You see how the game goes on. We land and alter things and build and rearrange and hoist paper flags on pins and subjugate populations and confer all the blessings of civilization upon these lands. We keep them going for days. At last as we begin to tire of them comes the scrubbing brush and we must burn our trees and dismantle our islands and put our soldiers in the little nests of drawers and stand the island boards up against the wall and put everything away. Then perhaps after a few days we begin upon some other such game just as we feel disposed. But it is never quite the same game, never. Another time it may be wildernesses, for example, and the boards are hills and never a drop of water is to be found except for the lakes and rivers we may mark out in chalk. But after one example others are easy and next I will tell you Section 3 of the Building of Cities We always build twin cities like London and Westminster or Budapest because two of us always want both of them to be mayors and municipal councils and it makes for local freedom and happiness to arrange it so. But when steam railways or street railways are involved we have our rails in common and we have an excellent law that rails must be laid down and switches kept open in such a manner that anyone feeling so disposed may send a through train from their own station back to their own station again without needless negotiation or the personal invasion of anyone else's administrative area. It is an undesirable thing to have other people bulging over one's houses in extreme cases knocking down and even treading on one's citizens it leads at times to explanations that are afterwards regretted. We always have twin cities or at the utmost stage of coalescence a city with two wards red end and blue end we mark the boundaries very carefully and our citizens have so much local patriotism Mr. Chesterton will learn that they stray but rarely over that thin little streak of white that bounds their municipal allegiance sometimes we have an election for mayor it is like a census but very abusive and red always wins only citizens with two legs and at least one arm and capable of standing up may vote and voters may poll on horseback Boy scouts and women and children may vote though there is a vigorous agitation to remove these disabilities Zulus and foreign looking persons such as East Indian cavalry and American Indians are also disfranchised so are riderless horses and camels but the elephant has never attempted to vote on any occasion and does not seem to desire the privilege it influences public opinion quite sufficiently as it is and it is a very important issue we have set out and I have photographed one of our cities to illustrate more clearly the amusement of the game red end is to the reader's right and includes most of the hill on which the town stands a shady zoological garden the town hall a railway tunnel through the hill a museum a way in the extreme right hand corner a church blue end has the railway station four or five shops several homes a hotel and a farmhouse close to the railway station the boundary drawn by me as overlord who also made the hills and tunnels and appointed the trees to grow runs irregularly between the two shops nearest the cathedral over the shoulder in front of the town hall and between the farm and the rifle range the nature of the hills I have already explained and this time we have had no lakes or ornamental water these are very easily made out of a piece of glass the glass lid of a box, for example laid upon silver paper such water becomes very readily populated by those celluloid seals and swans and ducks that are now so common paper fish appear below the surface and may be peered at by the curious but on this occasion we have nothing of the kind nor have we made use of a green colored tablecloth we sometimes use to drape our hills of course a large part of the fun of this game lies in the witty incorporation of all sorts of extraneous objects but the incorporation must be witty or you may soon convert the whole thing into an incoherent muddle of half good ideas I have taken two photographs one to the right and one to the left of this agreeable place I may perhaps adopt a kind of guidebook style in reviewing its principal features I begin at the railway station I have made a rather nearer and larger photograph of the railway station which presents a diversified and entertaining scene to the incoming visitor porters out of a box of porters career here and there with a truck some light baggage quite a number of our all too rare civilians parade the platform to gentlemen a lady and a small but evil looking child are particularly noticeable and there is a wooden sailor with jointed legs in a state of intoxication as reprehensible as it is nowadays happily rare two virtuous dogs regard his abandon with quiet scorn the seat on which he sprawls as a broken piece of some toy whose nature I have long forgotten the station clock is a similar fragment and so is the metallic pillar which bears the name of the station so many toys we find only become serviceable with a little smashing there is an allegory in this as Hawthorne used to write in his diary what is he doing the great god Pan down in the reeds by the river the fences at the ends of the platforms are pieces of wood belonging to the game of Matador that's splendid and very educational construction game hailing I believe from Hungary there is also I regret to say a blatant advertisement of jabs hair color showing the hair in the photograph the hair does not come out very plainly this is by GPW who seems marked out by destiny to be the advertisement writer of the next generation he spends much of his scanty leisure inventing and drawing advertisements of imaginary commodities oblivious to many happy beautiful and noble things in life he goes about studying and imitating the literature of the billboards he and his brother write newspapers almost entirely devoted to these annoying appeals you will note too in the middle of the railway tunnel urging the existence of Jinx soap upon the passing traveller the oblong object on the placard represents no doubt a cake of this offensive and aggressive commodity the zoological garden flaunts a placard zoo two cents pay and the grocer's picture of a cabbage with get them is not to be ignored FRW is more like London County Council in this respect and prefers bare walls returning from the station as the guide books say and giving one more glance at the passengers who are waiting for the privilege of going round the circle in open cars and returning in a prostrated condition to the station again and observing what admirable platforms are made by our nine by four and a half pieces we pass out to the left of the village street a motor omnibus a one horse hospital cart in less progressive days stands waiting for passengers and on our way to the cherry tree inn we remark two nurses one in charge of a child with a plasticine head the landlord of the inn is a small grotesque figure of plaster his sign is fastened on by a pen no doubt the refreshments supplied here are a considerable reputation to judge by the alacrity with which a number of riflemen move towards the door the inn, by the way, like the station and some private houses is roofed with stiff paper these stiff paper roofs are one of our greatest inventions after the game is over we put these roofs inside one another and stick them into the bookshelves the roof one folds and puts away will live to roof proceeding on our way past the cherry tree and resisting cozy invitation of its portals we come to the shopping-quarter of the town the stock in windows is made by hand out of plasticine we note the meat and hams of Mr. Wadi the cabbages and carrots of Todd and brothers the general activities of the Jocal Company shopman it is de regueur they should wear white helmets in the street boyscouts go to and fro a wagon clatters by most of the adult population is about its business and a red-coated band plays along the roadway contrast this animated scene with the mysteries of sea and forest rock and whirlpool in our previous game further on is the big church or cathedral it is built in an extremely debased it reminds us most of a church we once surveyed during a brief visit to Rotterdam on our way up the Rhine a solitary boy scout mindful of the views of Lord Haldane enters its high portal passing the cathedral we continue to the museum this museum is no empty boast it contains mineral specimens, shells such great shells as were found on the beaches of our previous game the titanic skulls of extinct rabbits and cats and other such wonders the slender curious may lie down on the floor and peep in at the windows we now, says the guidebook retrace our steps to the shops and then turning to the left ascend under the trees up the terraced hill on which stands the town hall this magnificent building is surmounted by a colossal statue of the chamois the work of a Wengen artist it is in two stories with a battle-mended roof and a crypt entrance to right of steps used for the incarceration of offenders it is occupied by the town guard who wear beef-eater costumes of ancient origin note the red parrot perched on the battlements it lives tame in the zoological gardens and is of the same species as one we formally observed in our archipelago note, too, the brisk cat and dog encounter below steps descend in wide flights down the hillside into blue-end the two Couchant lions on either side of the steps are in plasticine and were executed by that versatile artist who is also mayor of red-end GPW he is present our photographer has hit upon a happy moment in the history of this town and a conversation of the two mayors is going on upon the terrace before the palace FRW, mayor of blue-end stands on the steps in the costume of an admiral GPW is on horseback his habits are equestrian on the terrace the town guard parades in their honour and up the hill a number of musicians a little hidden by trees ride on grey horses towards them passing in front of the town hall and turning to the right we approach the zoological gardens here we pass two of our civilians a gentleman in black a lady and a large boy scout presumably their son we enter the gardens which are protected by a bearded janitor and remark it wants a band of three performing dogs who are, as the guide-book would say, discourseing sweet music in neither ward of the city does there seem to be the slightest restraint upon the use of musical instruments it is no place for neurotic people the gardens contain the inevitable elephants, camels which we breed and which are therefore inconsiderable numbers a sitting bear brought from last game's caves goats from the same region tamed and now running loose in the gardens dwarf elephants wooden nondescripts and other rare creatures the keepers wear a uniform not unlike that of railway guards and porters we wander through the gardens return to send the hill by the school of musketry where soldiers are to be seen shooting at the butts pass through the paddock of the old farm and so return to the railway station extremely gratified by all we have seen and almost equally divided in our minds between the merits and attractiveness of either ward a clockwork train comes clattering into the station we take our places somebody hoots or whistles for the engine which can't the signal is knocked over in the excitement of the moment the train starts and we wave a long regretful farewell to the salubrious cheerfulness of shammy city you see now how we set out and the spirit in which we set out our towns it demands but the slightest exercise of the imagination to devise a hundred editions and variations of the scheme you can make picture galleries great fun for small boys who can draw you can make factories you can plan out flower gardens which appeals very strongly to intelligent little girls your town hall may become a fortified castle or you may put the whole town on boards and make a Venice of it with ships and boats upon its canals and bridges across them we used to have some very serviceable ships of cardboard with flat bottoms and then we used to have a harbor and the ships used to sail away to distant rooms and even into the garden and return with the most remarkable cargoes loads of nasturtium stem logs for example made of gloves then made of glove fingers and several toy cranes I suppose we could find most of these again if we hunted for them once with this game fresh in our minds we went to see the docks which struck us as just our old harbor game magnified I say daddy said one of us in a quiet corner wistfully as one who speaks knowingly against the probabilities of the case couldn't we play just for a little with these sacks until somebody comes of course the setting out of the city is half the game then you devise incidents as I wanted to photograph the particular set out for the purpose of illustrating this account I took a larger share in the arrangement than I usually do it was necessary to get everything into the picture to ensure a light background to grow up some of the trees prevent too much overlapping and things like that when the photographing was over matters became more normal I left the school room and when I returned I found that the group of riflemen which had been converging on the public house had been sharply recalled to duty and were trotting in a disciplined cheerless way towards the railway station the elephant had escaped from the zoo into the blue ward and was being marched along by a military patrol the originally scattered Boy Scouts were being paraded GPW had demolished the shop of the Joe Kill Company and was building a red end station near the bend the stock of the Joe Kill Company had passed into the hands of the adjacent storekeepers then the town hall ceremonies came to an end and the guard marched off then GPW demolished the rifle range and ran a small branch of the urban railway uphill to the town hall door and on into the zoological gardens this was only the beginning of a period of enterprise in transit a small railway boom a number of halts of simple construction sprang up there was much making of railway tickets of a size that enabled passengers to stick their heads through the middle and wear them as a Mexican does his blanket then a battery of artillery turned up in the high street and there was talk of fortifications suppose wild Indians were to turn up across the plains to the left and attack the town fate still has toy drawers untouched so things will go on till putting away night on Friday then we shall pick up the roofs and shove them away among the books return the clockwork engines very carefully to their boxes for engines are fragile things stow the soldiers and civilians and animals in their nest of drawers burn the trees again this time they are sweet bay and all the joys and sorrows and rivalries and successes of blue end and red end will pass and follow Carthage and Nineveh the empire of Aztec and Roman the arts of Etruria and the palaces of Crete and the plantings and contrivings of innumerable myriads of children into the limbo of games exhausted it may be leaving some profit in thoughts widened in strengthened apprehensions it may be leaving nothing but a memory that dies section four funiculars, marble towers castles and war games but very little of war games I have now given two general types of floor game but these are only just two samples of delightful and imagination stirring variations that can be contrived out of the toys I have described I will now glance rather more shortly at some other very good uses of the floor the boards, the bricks, the soldiers and the railway system that pentagram for exercising the evil spirit of dullness from the lives of little boys and girls and first the kind of lark we call funiculars there are times when islands see somehow to dazzle and towns and cities are too orderly and uneventful and cramped for us and we want something something to whiz then we say let us make a funicular let us make a funicular more than we have ever done let us make one to reach up to the table we dispute whether it isn't the day we are after the bare name is refreshing it takes us back to that unforgettable time when we all went to Wengen winding in and out and up and up the mountainside from slush to such snow and sunlight as we had never seen before and we make a mountain railway so far we have never got it up to the table but some day we will then we will have a station and another station on the floor with shunts and sightings to each the peculiar joy of the mountain railway is that if it is properly made a loaded car not a toy engine it is too rough a game for delicate respectable engines will career from top to bottom of the system and go this way and that as your cunningly arranged switches determine and afterwards and this is a wonderful creative discovery you can send it back by electric what is electric you may well ask electrics were invented almost by accident by one of us to whom also the name is due it came out of an accident to a toy engine a toy engine that seemed done for and that was yet full of life you know perhaps what a toy engine is like it has the general appearance of a railway engine funnels, buffers, cab and so forth all these are very elegant things no doubt but they do not make for lightness they do not facilitate hill climbing now sometimes an engine gets its clockwork out of order and then it is over and done for but sometimes it is merely the outer semblance that is injured the funnel bent the body twisted you remove the things and you have bare clockwork on wheels an apparatus of almost malignant energy soul without body a kind of metallic rage this it was that our junior member instantly knew for electric and love from the moment of its stripping I have by the way known a very serviceable little road electric made out of a clockwork mouse well when we have got chairs and boxes and bricks and graded our lines skillfully and well easing the descent and being very careful of the joining at the bends for fear that the descending trucks and cars will jump the rails we send down first an empty truck then trucks loaded with bricks and led soldiers and then the electric and then afterwards the sturdy electric shoves up the trucks again to the top with a kind of savagery of purpose that is extremely gratifying to us we make switches in these lines we make them have level crossings at which collisions are always being just diverted the lines go over and under each other and in and out of tunnels the marble tower again is a great building on which we devise devious slanting ways down which marbles run I do not know why it is amusing to make a marble run down a long intricate path and dollop down steps and come almost but not quite to a stop and rush out of dark places and across little bridges of card yet is and we often do it castles are done with bricks and cardboard turrets and a portcullis of card and drawbridge and moats they are a mere special sort of city building done because we have a box of men and armor we could reconstruct all sorts of historical periods if the toy soldier makers would provide us with people but at present as I have already complained they make scarcely anything but contemporary fighting men and of the war game I must either write volumes or nothing for the present let it be nothing some day perhaps I will write a great book about the war game and tell of battles and campaigns and strategy and tactics but this time I set out merely to tell of the ordinary joys of playing with the floor and to gird improvingly and usefully at toy makers so much I think I have done if one parent or one uncle buys the wiser for me I shall not altogether have lived in vain end of book


Welcome back from our studio live, as you could see, in Halle. The next talk will be Natalie Kilber. She will talk about tails from the quantum industry. Nacho works since many, many years on quantum computers to make them real and useful. Hi, I'm Natalie, and I'll be talking about the progress, the prospects, and the poppycock, the nonsense of quantum technology, or you could also say, tails from the quantum industry. A little bit about me. I'm a prehistoric creature that has been there since the field emerged. I'm the master of stories for you today, and you might ask yourself, but why are you so gung-ho about quantum computing, buddy? Well, if you look at the Moore's Law's trends, then you know already that since 2000s, the clock speeds have been kind of stagnating, and we're going smaller and smaller. And IBM is going to fabricate a chip of about 2 nanometers in 2023.  And if you have a single electron transistor, you already have a quantum dot. That means that's a qubit. That's part of a quantum computer, but it's not reliable for classical computers, for any classical computation. So well, there we have it. We already are in a quantum regime if we want to go into the future. So why do I want quantum computers? I'm gung-ho about speed. I'm gung-ho about premium power. I want more juice. So first look at your PC. Now back to me. Now back at your PC. Sadly, it isn't an 8-core i9, or maybe it is. So yet, are you happy about your wiring? Well, I don't know why, but this fella is also happy as a muffin about his wiring. This is a quantum computer in Google's lab. And you can see the wiring is not trivial for this. And this is just one little chip. So a quantum computer is an accelerator, and you need a co-host CPU to do any sort of meaningful computation with it. And if you look at the wiring here, there's a different type of quantum computer. You see an optical table with optical components on it. I think this one is the Q-era startup. And yeah, this guy's not that happy about his wiring. I can see why. There's lots of other examples that look a bit difficult. And here specifically, you see a lot of controls that are sending signals into the quantum computer. And this one, again, is Q-era with a bit better wiring. This is specifically a trapped ion quantum computer. So they use trapped ion. Quantum computers don't come in one flavor. We have different flavors with different bases of fundamental technology that we use with different types of components. So in trapped ions, they use photonic components. There are photonic computers in itself. And for example, this one is a huge cryogenic fridge.  In the first picture, you've seen it without his clothes, without the enclosing, the enclave, and then again at the top, the massive wiring for just one chip. Then you have other examples like, for example, AQT, Alpine quantum technologies over there in Austria. And they know how to stuff their cables really well. And well, you might wonder, why am I not talking about quantum annealers? And well, if we define quantum computers so legs, then a salad is a quantum computer too. You know why a salad, any type of plant, uses quantum phenomena as well? So because of photosynthesis, the light tries to travel as fast as possible to the side, and they do it through quantum tunneling. And it solves it pretty fast. Yeah, so no quantum annealers. Then look back at your PC. Can it stem 5 gigahertz? You think you're unhappy about your clock speed? I think I win the complaining game. A quantum computer can do no more than 100 kilohertz. And that's twice the speed of the aniac back in the day. But then again, don't be so harsh on your setup or on the quantum computers. We still tinker with them with the capabilities we have. You've seen in the pictures before, there's a lot of wiring. They're components that are quite big, that haven't been invented yet. So the bottleneck component of a quantum computer of any setup, the slowest component is your bottleneck clock speed or your bottleneck in your clock cycle. And that's why they're so slow. In quantum computers, you have digital signaling processes. That means you have to convert digital signals to analog and analog signals to digital signals again. And we have that everywhere in our phones and our cameras. Imagine just sound that is analog that has to be converted into digital signals, or literally light photons if you take photo into digital signals. That's an analog to digital interface that we have. And here, because we're shooting microwave pulses and for example, superconducting computers and qubits, that's kind of difficult to do. So yeah, you might say, but they are parallel and they do everything a little bit different. Yeah, for algorithms, when you have such slow clock speed rates, if your time to solution outlives you, that's a problem. If you don't live to see your solution, that's too slow. And you might want to listen to your PC. You think that is loud, 30 decibels, 40 decibels? This is what a quantum computer sounds like. Specifically, you can hear the vacuum pump or superconducting on the IBM. Welcome to Sounds of IBM. Yeah, that's the grid that makes that sound. But you need it that way. So knowing what temperature can be taken for, well, only when you do get into the quiet zone is the dream of living, Kelvin. Stages, then you have a quantum phenomenon that you can control and improve. So yeah, this is nightmarishly loud. And yeah, you do need to quiet with it. But one thing is always the same. We always talk about size. And with size, I mean, we talk about qubits. You might read in Wired or Spiegel or wherever you want. Hype articles or just articles talking about the advancements in quantum computing, how many qubits they could instantiate on a chip. IBM released about 127 qubits and Q arrow, a bit about 200. Q arrow is the trapped iron one. And IBM is the superconducting one with these cylinders and the cryogenic fridges. But here you have to discern a lot of physical qubits is good. But a logical qubit is what you need for computation. You have a high arrow rate for just one physical qubit because of the noise, because of temperature, all types of noise, all types of environmental factors that you can't eliminate yet, because this is quite fundamental research, how you can control these things and how you can adjust the parameters so noise stays low. And then again, we have these types of signals in our normal classical devices where we need parity checks, where we need error correction. And so do quantum computers. Error correction is a huge field that needs to be advanced. And we use things that are called surface codes. And these are error correcting. And to get one logical qubit so we have reliable computation, we need a lot of physical qubits. So you could say there's a lot of overhead for those error correcting codes and parity checks. So if you hear about this many qubits have been accomplished by a company, it's usually physical qubits. But then at a factor of 20, that's just one logical qubit that you can use. Yeah, that's difficult. And there's a famous physicist that said, well, he's still alive, so it's actually on Twitter. And he said, well, qubits are like children. It's better to have a few high quality ones than a bunch of noisy ones. And yes, I agree. And John Presca has been at Microsoft before. Now he's at AWS. But at Microsoft, we witnessed a Majorana scandal. Well, we thought we can have a topological qubit that has no noise. That means if we have one qubit, we don't need these many physical qubits to have one logical one. Because it is a topological one with no, with entrenched error correction, one could say, by the physical nature. So yeah, also Reiner Blatt said, befittingly, it was called the elusive Majorana particle. Because yes, we've been waiting for 10 years for this Majorana qubit, but there was this scandal. The big one of Majorana qubits wasn't a big one. After all, they had to retract the paper that said they found one. So we're still looking for it. Yeah, but then again, it is better to have a few noisy physical qubits than none at all. So yes, quantum computing is full of challenges. You have seen the wiring. Getting so many wires into one of those cryogenic fridges is very difficult. So we have to find new ways to get CMOS those little controllers into that fridge so we have to reduce the wiring, for example. And that's not a trivial task, because you get a lot of resistance when you go colder for cables, for example. We're advancing microwave technologies with quantum computers. And one thing that kind of worries me the most is that we don't have quantum memory yet. So Q-ROM, random access memory. Because at the moment, a quantum computer is just an accelerator. So it's a read-only memory. So everything that is on the chip or on the qubits or on the setup, that is read out like that. You can't store them or you can't do any more meaningful computations. So that's a huge bottleneck. Another thing is the ethical dimension. We have to use in superconducting quantum computers a lot of helium. And helium has supply bottlenecks with just two companies, Qatar Gas and then one Northern Texas company that supplies helium. That is not really the problem, though, because we need even something else. We need three helium, which is an isotope, and that you get as a nuclear byproduct through tritium. That's not something I'm going to count on, especially because these are limited resources. And sometimes the components in quantum computers themselves, they're also rare earth metals. Those are also limited resources. And then people keep talking about democratizing quantum computers. Yet you have other problems there first. Not everyone needs access to something that doesn't solve a lot of things yet. And to be honest, with the security controls in place, it's kind of an open system already. But yeah, when we look at quantum, we have to think about the references. Which specs do you have to look for? And the magic here is common sense, as I've shown you. Compare it to what you know, the components that you know. And again, the magic is common sense. And the quantum computers are very specific. Yet quantum technologies, the components of a quantum computer, the sensors, single electron sensors that we use in MRI, that we use in spectroscopy for microscopes, and yada yada, even more things in quantum communication type. So semiconductors or semiconductor components or just our infrastructure and communication. They can be part of the quantum technology zoo as well. But you have to be also careful. Everything is quantum now. It's quite the hype. So finance is doing somehow quantum. I don't know what other companies think. Well, the buzzword cyber isn't enough and use two buzzwords, quantum and cyber. I'm very curious what they do. Then there's quantum transportation. I'm lost here. I don't know what they do. I don't want to know. And here, I mean, I'm sure that is pain-free. Yeah, you can also have TPN. Actually, I really wanted to find this in April 2020. Yeah, so quantum computing is claimed to solve a lot of today's problems. Some companies claim they're battling climate change, they're transforming the pharma industry, they're transforming the finance industry and they break all encryption in the future, as we know. So quantum computers will break the internet in the future. Yet again, looking at the research estimations, not including the clock speeds or the actual performance, that's difficult to claim. But then again, looking at the references and the facts and the specs, not all claim these weird things, but the reference facts like CLOPs from IBM, these are advancements that are meaningful. But then again, we have this flood of references of qubits, of we're advancing this and that, complexity theory claims. Well, but how are you going to test these complexity theory claims? Well, because we don't have the qubits we simulated on a fantasy machine. And if anyone like this old chap here had to deal with theoretical complexity resource estimates, AKA fantasy language, well, welcome to Imagination Learned. This town, this town is not a nice place for little fillies all alone. There are lots of twists and corners that could lead to the unknown. Let me guide you away and I'll be sure to help you through. You could really use a friend out here and luckily I've picked my free favorite corners for you. Well, quantum applications where applicability is optional. So come on, let's start with a very well known topic, optimization. In the beginning I've talked, I want premium power, I want maximum juice. So, VSLI design, what is a VSLI? It's very large scale integration and it means we need to partition these little chips that we have and the first chip that we had back in the day was an integrated circuit to help people hear better. So it was a hearing aid that Jack Kilby in 1958 designed. And this thoughtful design or the basis of it is the basis for our technology everywhere. And it's not a trivial task to design these chips so we don't have a lot of waste and we can pack more and more components on these little chips. So, integrated circuits, if you don't know it, anything IOT is that. Another problem, the mathematical basis for this problem is the same for network design or less waste and manufacturing like stenching or lasering. Even flight scheduling between cities has this mathematical problem. Some might know it as bin packing, max cut or multi-cut problems. You either seek to minimize or to maximize an objective. So, those combinatorial problems are really one of the hardest ones to solve and I like to call them combinatorial black magic. These levels of hard to solve are classes in themselves and this is actually a real graph. This is a Peterson graph and you can tell it's black magic. You might think this is not that hard but I'll show you a benchmark of max cut problems. This one's NP hard, NP complete. This is one of these fantasy language classes. It just means that no polynomial time algorithms for max cut in general graphs are known. That means, again, your time to solution outlives you and it's a problem if you need to wait until your solution comes and you die before. Or maybe it needs even a couple of hundred years. I don't know how long you live but some say it's almost as hard as beating calamity in dark souls. But yeah, you don't live to see it. That's the drawback of this. So yeah, you might think optimization. It's black magic, it sounds weird but you have heard these terms before. I will specifically be gung-ho and talk about nature-inspired ones, the physics-inspired algorithms. But you know neural networks, you probably know taboo search, linear programming, mixed integer programming. Within branch and cut, you can see the max cut problems that's in the brown part. And then, of course, other nature-based methods like bad search, genetic algorithms, or small methods. Where it becomes quantum is and that's what I like about the nature-inspired part. Nature-inspired optimization algorithms, for example, they minimize the Hamiltonian of an ICM model. So whatever mathematical basis you have, you minimize or maximize your objective. Hamiltonians are something you use in quantum computing and the ICM model I can explain later if we have a little bit more time. So what we need here too with classical and quantum computers is benchmarks so we can compare apples to apples because classical compute and quantum compute is more like apples and bananas. So we need a common ground. And if you want standardized benchmarks for such problems, you can Google Chuck, C-H-O-O-K. It's an open-source benchmark suit and you probably see it in the slide, good old professor Katzgraber, Kat Graber. He has written this benchmark suit and he's gung-ho about cats so please spam him with cat content. So yeah, I told you we'll get into the MaxCut benchmarks. This is from a paper of Cambridge, I think, Cambridge quantum computing. And these little circles, these little dots, these are nodes and you can see they've run it on a quantum computer for 10 nodes and it's very complicated. Yeah, and the problem here is when they went to 13 or 23 qubits, logical qubits, they had to simulate it. They had to put it on a fantasy machine on classical hardware. And yeah, that's also one algorithm they used, VQE, Variational Quantum Igon Solver and QuoA. These are approximate algorithms. You can think of very noisy, annoying quantum computers that don't spit out the correct results but if you run it a hundred times, the majority of it will be towards the correct regime. And yeah, that's how you go about it. This is a relatively new paper and I have to say these resource estimations, these are amazing results and I'm not worried about the algorithmic advances in quantum computing because we have smart people and I want more smart people so if you want to, you should get into it. So yeah, that's not what I'm worried about. Yet, I don't wanna solve something for 10 qubits or sorry, 10 nodes on a quantum computer yet we can solve something bigger. So this is from another paper from a nature-inspired, physics-inspired algorithm. Some already call it quantum-inspired. These are a hundred nodes but at the lowest, you can see the physics-inspired GNN, the pi GNN, they managed to do it with a 10,000 nodes. So on classical hardware, the quantum algorithm put on classical hardware to overcome the QPU hardware limitations by treating these physics algorithms as optimizes. So from a business perspective, if I want to have maximum power and maximum juice, I would use classical computers and use the heuristics from quantum and classical until the quantum computers are ready. So yeah, nature-inspired optimization with quantum algorithms, that's like putting neural networks in steroids. Quite like that. This is the paper for it. But yes, we've been far deep into one corner. So I'll drag you back and I'll show you another one. Some companies claim we're solving climate change with it. We're transforming pharma. And yeah, this comes from ideas of physicists where they said, well, the nature is quantum mechanical. We might as well need a quantum phenomena to simulate them. Well, he's right. But yes, it's not that easy. These physicists played bongos and strip probes. He's a real hero. And yeah, as a physicist, he's known for that. We're talking about chemistry. Here's ammonia. You don't think this is difficult, but ammonia is used for a lot of things in the world. You use it as a base if there's something acidic. You use it as a fertilizer. You use it in a lot of things in chemistry. Even raw latex is being transported with it or anything that has an acidic nature. You get it by a very difficult process. Well, it's not a difficult, but an energy expenditure, high one. So you need high temperatures and high energies to put it into the Haber-Bosch process. And it accounts for 2% of the global energy expenditure. It's a very famous problem that quantum physicists wanted to solve because it's really useful stuff, ammonia. And if we can cut 2% of the global energy expenditure, that's a good thing. It's not trivial though, Richard said it. It's not an easy thing to do. Here you can see just the active side of an enzyme where you can produce ammonia without high temperature and high energy. Bacteria can do it by room temperature, ambient temperatures. There's algae that's all types of bacteria that can do it. And the active side is called Fumoco. Here you can see the resource estimates for half of the sites for the energy to simulate to see how this works because bacteria can do it. We don't know how they do it. That's why we use so much energy and temperature. The enzyme and the bacteria looks like this. And then again, look back at the computer. For both parts we need over 2,000 logical qubits. Now think back, physical qubits are by a factor of 20 or 100 more, so we're not here yet. And then again, classical computers can simulate it either and we will probably simulate it better on quantum but we're not there yet. And to put it into perspective, to the far right, the orange little molecule is the Fumoco bit in the whole enzyme. And you might wonder, what is the THC cost while that's tensor hypercontraction? So yeah, algorithmic advancements, I'm not so worried about. We're pushing the frontiers there. So yeah, but back to imagination lines. The most powerful magic is common sense and you should wield it. So what do you think? Do you wanna use a quantum computer or intermediate steps to find out what we need? Well, what people do these days is they're a bit smarter and they do simulate it. They do use some digital parts, but it's mostly haptic. Haptic means they simulate a little bit and they test it in a lab. And what they test it in the lab, they can funnel down what they need to simulate. The paper I've been talking about for the Fumoco bit with the logical qubits is a very recent one. So it's just a couple of days it's been published. I think this is a preprint even. And if you wanna know anything about resource estimates in quantum computing, for chemistry specifically, Nathan Wiebe and Ryan Babush are a good place to look for. Then we are still at quantum applications where applicability is optional and it has been true so far, hasn't it? Let's move to a corner that hits closer to home, cybersecurity. We have to be specific here. I know a lot of companies claim there won't be any type of encryption as we know of in the future because quantum computers will break it. Well, for once AES-265, 56, my English is bad, AES-256 bit mode can't be broken by quantum computers and symmetric key size, symmetric encryption methods are known to be quantum secure at a specific key size. So not really. What people usually think of is asymmetric encryption. So yeah, these are some resource estimates to look out for. This is a Microsoft paper not too long ago and they said with a punchline it is easier to break elliptic curve encryption than RSA. Then Google not too long ago came up with two million noisy qubits, so physical qubits, to break RSA 2048 bit in eight hours. And then also the newest paper saying that factoring at 2048 bit RSA integer can be done in 177 days with about a little bit more than 13,000 qubits but with a multimode memory that does not exist yet. These are incredible results over the years in resource estimation numbers. Yet again, let's put it into perspective. So 2012, we said it's a billion in this year. 2021 isn't over yet. This year, Google came up with 20 million noisy qubits and then Guzien came up with a little bit of 13,000 or more but let alone any workable implementation of cura-ram is a purely theoretical nature as of now. So we're still in imagination land when it comes to breaking the internet as we know it. It's time to leave fantasy land so you might say, hey, but we did factor relatively high numbers back then in 2013. You've heard this in the news. Well, yes, we did, but if you know the base beforehand, so if you know that with 35, the number 35, you can divide by five or seven. If you know one base, that's a really easy thing to do and you can do that classically as well. So IBM had to counter publish that they were oversimplifying quantum factoring and the algorithm you use for it is Schwartz algorithm. It's one of the purebred quantum algorithms out there. And then again, another one pretending to factor large numbers on quantum computers. So no, we haven't been able to break it so far. Another one in 2019, and this is a very interesting one because IBM goes to these problems and says, yeah, well, I wanna test it. I wanna simulate it, sorry, not simulate it. I wanna test it literally in quantum hardware. And they did so, but they failed to factor just the number 35. So I think we're safe for some time. You have to think of quantum computers not as a quantum threat, but more as a quantum advantage. If someone knows how to steal encrypted data and store it about 20 years to decrypted, you know, get it now and decrypted 20 years. Later and store it somewhere. They probably know where to get it unencrypted as well. They're more low-hanging fruits for them. And I don't think they will wait until the quantum computer comes into fruition to do these sort of things. So let's put the quantum threat into perspective. Quantum computers are logical extensions of Moore's Law's trend. And quantum computers are tailor-made for simulating the behavior of quantum systems like molecules or materials. And whether they lead to breakthroughs in cryptography or optimization problems, that is less clear yet. But we're pushing the boundaries. If anything, components of quantum computers are pushing the boundaries for us literally now. If we have better seeds like quantum random number generators for short QRNGs, that is very useful. We need seeds that are truly random. For example, in places where we can't use true random number generators that use entropy to generate the random numbers because in a data center, you don't want a lot of entropy. So you don't want temperature diversity. You want it to be cold and stay cold. Or sometimes you don't have the possibility of having this anywhere where it's just not there. So we do make things smaller with it as well. You've seen the wiring. So we have to design microwave technology or any type of cabling, any types of chips, preprocessors that can go into smaller and smaller spaces. So, yes, we do need quantum computers and the research around it. We don't need it in business settings just yet because they're not ready. This is still very much fundamental research and we should note that. So, mathematical concepts are more useful to find also new ciphers when we're talking about cybersecurity. And I'm not talking specifically about PQC. There are other mathematical concepts for asymmetric and symmetric encryption that can be used. But for now, let's leave imagination land and let's think about how quantum computers interface with the world. Well, I've shown you before that quantum computers sometimes have a quaggling fridge. So if you look at the cylinder, you see the enclosure of it. So this specific example, I use a superconducting computer for now. I've told you before we need a host CPU and then a control system, lots of peripherals and wiring to get into the cryogenic stage and the enclosure. And there we usually have an analog digital interface and at the bottom where it's the coldest, the QPU. So you can think of it as, yeah, a huge system. So this is an example of Google setup. And I think the key concept that needs to be highlighted here is that quantum computers are merely co-processes and as such, they depend on traditional compute environments to host them. A quantum processing unit at QPU requires an unlocked digital interface to convert those signals back and forth and in turn the application logic in the host CPU that may connect to a network may. Some people think if I have it in the lab and it's not connected to anything, this must be air-gapped. But then again, you know how loud these devices are. So you kind of want RDP so people don't become deaf. And with Corona, you kind of want people to work from home as well. So they won't be air-gapped for the foreseeable future I guess or for the next year at least. So the issue of cyber security and nascent quantum computing resources that is rarely discussed. These systems are and they will be hybrid systems for the foreseeable future with those CPU hosts, with cloud-based or managed APIs and we need reliable services and secure services and architectures as this arises. So subsequently, the critical applications and data these systems will handle and store if it's the knowledge and the algorithms how to simulate FAMOCO so we can produce the ammonia with less energy expenditure. If we design new batteries, these are probably patents so we want to secure the data behind it and those algorithms. So this means that all classical security best practices hold for quantum computers. So yeah, this example of a QC lab at Google. These enterprise system constitute of a mix of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, I don't know, maybe Azure AD, SaaS, network containers, whatever, platforms. And they're part of these industrial control systems and programmable logic controllers, PLCs or discrete process control systems. Anything in ICS, SCADA, this is rarely air-gapped. It means physically separated from any network. So we need API hardening. ICS security is not a big topic in quantum computing yet because it's still just a system on the internet and it's not quite ripe yet. Yet people sell it and companies put sensible data on there. So if the ISS back in the day got infected with the gummy malworm, that was considered air-gapped. No ICS system is truly really air-gapped anymore. So before we offer quantum computing as breakthrough accelerators, we need to make them safe to use. So if you want to join me, let's protect quantum computers from getting pawned. Thank you for listening to me. Let's talk. Thank you so much. We have some time for questions. So audience, dear audience, please ask some questions. The hashtags are on Mastodon and Twitter. Hashtag RC3 chaos zone and the IRC room is the channel RC3-chaos zone. All right, and I will watch the questions. We have some questions already. What do you think about rolling out so-called post-quantum cryptography now? Yeah, post-quantum crypto. I know it's been a useful concept from NIST and they have a specific problem in mind. NIST is for the national security and probably government infrastructure in the US specifically, but they're thinking of a long-lived systems with PQC. You have the problem, it's highly computationally intensive so a lot of infrastructure can't cope with it so you need to deploy other infrastructure. And if you're worried about your data, your intelligence behind your data being stolen and then saved for 20 years, not many companies have secrets that you can store or that intelligence, that specific data that they then steal and store, that is useful. So if you have data that has an intelligence life for over 20 years, yeah, that's useful. If it's a government side, if it's a nuclear bomb place side or something, very critical, yes, you have to think about it now and we do need time to implement the infrastructure. And I mean, it hits close to home. We've heard about crypto agility. It's a thing that we would like to have but it's not the reality. We just have legacy systems. We have to keep them running and especially if it's critical infrastructure, you can just turn it off, build something new and turn it on. It has to work throughout. So PQC is useful for some problems but not for all. It's not a one fits all glove. All right, thank you. The next question is, you talked about the current number of qubits and how no practical problem of the difficult problems that the people are hopeful for quantum computers to solve. That the technology isn't there yet due to the low number of qubits. Would it make sense to serialize the problems and run them on low qubit count quantum computers? Does that work? I think I might not understand the question fully but I assume you mean you package these little problems and I've shown you the algorithm that THC, the tensor hyper contraction algorithm that the chemical guys have used where we do these sort of things but then again, one qubit you can think of roughly as one transistor and you just need a couple more than five or 10 to do meaningful computations. As you've seen, that is a very good question that we do package these problems into smaller bits and if you go back into the slides or look into the paper of Nathan Wiebe and Ryan Babush, you see that you need still about more than 2,000 logical qubits. So you're spot on, this is the direction that they wanted to go and we have to go and they had to try it. The unfortunate, we still need more than a couple of hundred. So are there any current quantum computers that are programmable to do something useful? I mean, it depends on what you mean useful. It's very educational to use them. If you want to have a workforce in 10 years that knows how to use them, you need to have postdocs or master students who know how to program these things, who need to know how to write better compilers, what are the bottlenecks, how we can swap gates, quantum gates, these are operations on a quantum computer so how we can swap these things and that's a useful thing for them to do. In any stage, a workable quantum computer with just a few qubits is still needed to advance the field and to advance the workforce. So for me, this is still useful. All right, yeah, that makes sense. What do you see as candidates for earliest productive uses of quantum computers? Ooh, so you mean the question of the killer application for quantum computers? That's a difficult one, so for cryptography or for optimization, I've said it before, it's less clear, but for chemistry, once we hit those 20,000 or more logical qubits, we'll see advancements in catalysts. You've seen the Fomoco molecule, this is the active site for the nitrogenase to get ammonia at room temperature and that's where I see the advancements for small catalysts for get alloys and metals to find better storage for batteries. There's still a field out there that we couldn't simulate on classical because it's quite intractable, but we're pushing the field and I think chemistry could be one of the first ones, it's just not there yet. All right, do you also think that'll be the earliest ones, chemistry applications? Small molecules for catalysts, yes, they could be. I mean, the smarter people than me out there that might have better ideas, maybe design a completely new battery storage where ammonia is being used in fuel cells as well for storage, maybe they'll simulate how to get ammonia cheaper energy expenditure-wise and then use it to store, have better storage in fuel cells. Yet, I mean, there are some quantum computing services out there that are kind of interesting, depends what you're looking for. I think Cambridge Quantum Computing offers a three-qubit encryption suite if you want to do QKD. I mean, it's a fun toy game, I'm not sure if it's very business-relevant, but if you want to look if your current infrastructure could hold it, that's an interesting one. Quantum communication with the components especially in it, that part of the quantum tech world is more advanced and more ripe, so a lot of devices in quantum communication you can use now already. So it's just about your risk appetite. Do you want to, well, spend a lot of money on it? Do you want to invest into it and try it out? There are some testbeds in Berlin and Paris where they're trying out QKD networks. Yet, you know, this is telecom, this is not quantum computing, but it would be the backbone if we want to have a quantum internet where then again quantum computers are useful. So everything is useful because it's an intermediate step towards something you would like to have, but most of the things in quantum computers, they don't beat classical solutions yet. You talked about the tech sectors on quantum computers that are dramatizing this a little bit. What is the worst case of a quantum computer getting pawned? I mean, worst case is some company has their sensible business data on it and they harvest that.  You don't have these usual SLAs with them yet, but think about all these companies that don't know what they're doing and they might have the critical data up there in the cloud pushing it there and if the API isn't hardened, if it's open access for everything, they may just have low hanging fruit to pick out there. Thank you so much, Nacho. This was Tales from the Quantum Industry by Nacho. Thank you. Thank you. All right, our next talk will be at 1730. What is Algorave? It's about a community that live codes music and celebrates the artifacts and the algorithms that they use.


Okay, Larry Pezzavento, mid-afternoon update for TFNN. I posted a chart here in the room, everybody can see it if they get online. It is a chart of Apple, Friday's high was an exact 61% of the July 27th high. That was also coming in at exactly 186, 36, the high was 186, 42, we're now buck and half under that. I was assuming we were going to get a pretty good sell-off today and we started okay last night, but we're down about 25 handles in the S&P course. We went back and we made a slightly higher high by just a point. Same thing in the NASDAQ and the same thing in the Dow Jones went much higher. And the reason why that is because of Boeing. Boeing has some good news. I think it was coming out of China, but I don't know for sure. I just saw good news from Bloomberg. So anyway, what I'm watching now is the fact that Apple being the most widely held stock. In fact, it stopped exactly at that number. And if you look at it real closely here, you'll see that you see a really nice little ABCD pattern over the last 14 days. If you remember on the 27th of October, we had a solar eclipse and a full moon. And now we have a new moon coming in here today, the 13th, Trescaidecophobia. Well that's fear, the number 13, which was Friday the 13th, which took care of the Knights Templars in 1207 AD. Anyway, let's get back to the real numbers of this business. Anyway, this is what we're watching today. There's a really small probability that we're going to bust out to the upside from here. A slightly stronger probability that we might start to sell off from this level. But how much? No one knows. They're very, very strong and just about all the markets have done very well with the exception of the Russell. They just doesn't have any friends in the Russell. We'll look at that when we come up to our program coming here. I hope you folks will be able to join me on the 15th of November when we're going to have a full day trading. And I wish that day was today, folks, because we had a really good day so far. We're going to go through those trades because I sent them out in video last night so we could prepare for them. And that's what we want to try to do is prepare our trades, plan our trades, put them on, forget about it and not even worry about the rest of it. That's basically what we're trying to do here at TF&M. Now I have to double check here. We'll be right back<PHONE_NUMBER>.


The real difference, between and among, from espressoenglish.net. It is often taught that between is used for two items and among for three or more, but this is not completely accurate. The more accurate difference is this. Between is used when naming distinct individual items. It can be two items, three items, or more. And among is used when the items are part of a group or are not specifically named. And to use among, it must be three or more things. Here's an example. The negotiations between Brazil, Argentina, and Chile are going well. The negotiations among the countries of South America are going well. You can see in the first example we use between with three items, but we name each of the three things individually. And in the second sentence we use among because we refer to the countries as a group. Here's another example. I'm trying to decide between the green shirt, the blue shirt, and the black shirt. Again, we can use between with two, three, four, or more individual items, as long as we name them specifically. But if we refer to them as a group, then we should use among. I'm trying to decide among these shirts. Another student asked me if the correct expression is between you and I or between you and me. It's always between you and me. This expression is used when you want the other person to keep some information a secret. For example, between you and me, I think John got fired because he's completely incompetent. Using the expression between you and me means that I want you to know this information, but I don't want you to share it with anybody else. If you want to clear up your doubts so you can use English words more confidently, check out my ebook, 600 plus confusing English words explained. You can click on the link for more information and free samples.


So, my name's Colin Murphy, I work at Adobe, that's what I looked like before COVID. This is a customer story and it's a little different because I've given this sort of talk to a lot of people at Adobe and I have to kind of talk for 20 minutes about what WebAssembly is and so kind of trying to invert it, I've also like been aggressively pruning as the day goes and people cover things that I would have covered. I also want to set your expectations low and I don't want to do too good of a job because Ranu, he gets really stressed out, so don't want to set you guys up for failure. All right, so this is the biggest hurdle is just like, well, what's WebAssembly, right? You kind of get, Adobe, I don't know, I'm assuming you've all heard of it, it's a pretty big company, it's not like Microsoft or something, but there's a lot to it and it's hard to kind of commit people with what application should look like, how we're going to compose applications because where they're coming from, if they're front end, then they're thinking, oh, I know WebAssembly and they don't, not in the context of Wazi and all that. They're back end and they're like, well, I know Docker and I don't want to, don't bother me, right? I just want to write my Java script, my Java, my Spring Boot apps, so it's kind of like Docker and it's like it's not really like Docker and then Edge Compute's still really early on and so, but I think that's kind of the whole point is that you have to kind of consider it as a way of composing an application, really, from beginning to end. So, yeah, so let's keep going. So WebAssembly is already used quite a bit at Adobe and if any of the higher ups at Adobe ever learn about this thing called CNCF and that there's this KubeCon thing, I'm not really going to kind of cover my tail here and I'm not going to go into how we use WebAssembly too much. So sorry if that's what you're here for. And that's also because I'm not a C++ engineer. I only recently became a front-end engineer. I actually was responsible for document clouds, infrastructure and developer experience for the microservices. So Adobe Sign, Acrobat, kind of how Kubernetes was laid out, how people did CI, CD, what their Spring Boot apps looked like, all that kind of, there was a lot to it. And I recently switched over to Creative Cloud Web, kind of a career limiting move perhaps, but I'm now just like a sub-average JavaScript developer. And sorry, so there is a lot going on C++. There's, we've worked with the Chrome team. I'm using We Loosely there. There's actually some really great write-ups about this kind of stuff. So there were dynamic threads, dynamic threads of P threads, SIMD instructions, performance optimized storage from origin private file system. There was a lot of work done in order to get Photoshop working in the browser. So I don't know if you're all aware, but there's Photoshop in the browser now. Acrobat has, if you use the web version of Acrobat, then you'll see there's, well, there's a lot of web assembly there as well. But really the whole purpose of web assembly in the front end for Adobe is we have a lot of C++ code. We've had a lot of C++ code for decades. And we want to use that in the browser, right? We want to have good browser experiences. But that's not really applicable because none of that stuff's going to work, right, in Waze, none of that stuff's going to work without that JavaScript calling the making the system calls. But kind of the nice thing is at Adobe, we have a really positive appreciation for web assembly. If you say web assembly, that gives really high, high, high marks. People like the term, rates highly. For server side, everything's on Kubernetes, for better or worse, and there's not a lot of kind of these big epic engineering challenges, at least that were enough to keep me interested. And so, so now I'm a JavaScript developer. So, yeah, so the story kind of where the story begins is Adobe Sign. About a year ago I started really working in earnest on how we were going to do microservices in FedRAM. And that would probably be a great KubeCon talk all in and of itself. But right before we started our real auditing of our application, the FedRAMP standard changed. And now any CVE at all, of any rating, had to be reported to our sponsor. And so I don't know if you, I don't know if anybody here's run Kubernetes, but you end up using a lot of third party images. And if you're fairly sophisticated, you have lots of controllers, and you think you've done a great job, covered all your bases, and you end up with thousands of CVEs. And you'll have one libc vulnerability from 2013 that nobody thinks is important. That'll get flagged in Ubuntu, Red Hat, and maybe Alpine. So they've got, that's three CVEs right there that no one has ever, any intention of ever fixing. So you're going, it's going to be difficult for you to get through a FedRAMP audit if you use lots of Docker images. You actually have three options. One, you can start paying people money. So if you use Istio, you can start paying SoloIO, a bunch of money. Or maybe not too much, but it can get pricey. And you can fork all of these third party projects, which is a lot of fun.  And it was, it was painful, and it's kind of still painful. So anyway, we're kind of reaching the end of our challenges. This CVE thing is terrible. And so I'm just kind of looking around and seeing what's the, what's the successor to Docker? What's the successor to Kubernetes? And so I kind of, I started, I got into WebAssembly. Started looking at WebAssembly and I set out to say, well, could I take a microservice that's actually used in production, a simple one, and could I make it into WebAssembly? And could I deploy it on the client, on the edge, on the server? And, and I just kind of, on this slide I added this like arrow. It's like, you know, at this point, everything's moving this way. I'm sure some data will move back, or maybe it'll converge in the middle. But we're trying to get a lot of functionality for that data locality. Bailey said it better, whatever. It's good to have stuff here. So, and, and, you know, this is kind of the problem we've had. I think we've said it before. I was talking about Heroku earlier, right? Is Java, JavaScript, Unix Wars, right? G-Lib C, right? We want stuff that can be, can be used in lots of different places. And that's, that's like, well, this is kind of the ideal, right? I, software developers, they write, they understand the business logic and then they don't have to worry about how it gets deployed or, or, or what, what it, all the, all the things they don't have to care about, right? That's kind of what we've been doing here for platforms for a while. Yeah, so, so this is kind of like, so I'll get there. I'm gonna demo that. But, so what, this is kind of my initial impression. Like, okay, WebAssembly. So, I don't have to have the, I don't have to have the operating system that's in Docker, right? I can have it be really fast. It's gonna be much better than, I mean, I'm comparing it to the JVM. I'm comparing it to Spring Boot. So it's, it's a low bar, right? In terms of startup time, say, or memory footprint. And also, compliance is really big. We're, everything's, you know, we had a lot of HIPAA, FedRAMP, Zaktu, PCI. So these were kind of like, okay, this is gonna be great. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this. And maybe we can just run it, you know. Like, maybe we can start moving people over. And, oh yeah, and of course, right, is the spend. So, so we, once again, you know, somebody at Adobe might find out about this conference.  What is CNCF, you know? So, but it's a lot and I can't say how much it is, but it's a lot. Okay, so, this is what I did. I, we have this really simple Java Spring Boot app that you give it an image, and it removes the background. Not too hard, I'm sure you guys can figure out how it's kind of done, but very trivial. And then, and I just wanted to see if I could, if I could run it. I did, I did Fastly, Cloudflare, Browser and server side. So, time for demo. So, so actually at first, I'm just going to play a video because then, because it's actually going to run, it's actually going to run inside. I'm going to, as I move it over, there we go. Didn't want, and okay. So, what was that? That was awful. Click, click. Okay, all right, so, so here we go. So, this is actually going to run inside, inside Kubernetes, which is pretty cool. So, this runs inside our actual, like Adobe Kubernetes. So, I've, I've written, I've written out this business logic and I'm just going to import it into. Wasm Cloud, I picked Wasm Cloud. This was a year ago. It's been good. So, yeah, not pretty much, I'm just calling it and then I'm returning some HTML. There's nothing, it's kind of like, how, how easy it is. It actually was, so overall, really easy. And then I did Cloudflare and Fastly. They were also fairly easy just to import my Rust, have it compiled to a Wasm. So Fastly, of course, actually is Wasm time, Cloudflare's V8. Didn't really make much of a difference. And it's kind of artifact-y, all right. So, let's see. See if I actually start doing it now. Okay, good. All right, so we had to pick a signature. This is kind of a tradition, since we, or since this app was originally written that we pick a signature of sufficient complexity for the contour tracing. And so this one is actually running, this is actually running live in a Kubernetes cluster used by Adobe. So that actually takes a lot of work and I'll show Taylor's network diagram at some point, how that works. So yeah, and then now going on to Cloudflare. I believe, I go on to Cloudflare, pretty quickly. I'm not gonna mess with it. And then, yeah. All right, that's Cloudflare. So this is Cloudflare, it's actually running. I probably shouldn't have done this, but this is actually running on Cloudflare, same thing. Pick the image, load it up, and it's gonna remove the background. It's kind of slow, isn't like one and a half, okay. So yeah, so really not hard. Pretty easy, once you get the, once you write your app, you can run it on Wasm Cloud in Kubernetes. You can run it on Cloudflare. And then actually that's the end, and then I, so what actually what happened was this got put into the product. And so the next thing is showing the beta version of the product, I can't show. So I'll just, I feel it's not very impressive. It was impressive to some people, let's just say. And so, let's see, I'm gonna bring up my, it might be small, sorry. Local host 8000, local host 8000. So it's gonna, I'm gonna drop it in. I'm gonna drop the image in, see if I can drag and drop. And it's not gonna let me do it. Okay, I might have to not do this. I don't understand Mac, OSX is kinda, or whatever. Mac OS is kinda killing me here. Can't drag a, drag a something into it. Well, good thing this isn't a Mac demo, cuz it's failing. Oh, crying out loud. Really? Come on, drag and drop. Drag and drop. Okay, okay. If you drag and drop, you get the same response. So it works in all three places. Really? Like I guess I need to bring a mouse next time. Thanks, trackpad. Okay, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. If you could drag and drop in a UI, then I could show you that I can drag and drop this file. Okay, thanks. Okay, well you can't, you can't, cuz Mac can't handle this. This is good, thanks. Thanks, Steve. All right, so, anyway, yeah, if I could drag and drop, it would do the same thing. Okay, so, excessive memory, okay. All right, all right, moving on. So that's a demo, and that was actually pretty cool. And of course, I showed this to people, and they were like, we can just run in the browser, great. And that's what most people took out of that. But, and it actually is going to be put into the product. To replace something, you'll never notice. So now that will be done in the browser. Next demo, next demo. I was afraid this is gonna be too short. So that's where we are. Now it's excruciatingly long. All right, so next thing was, Cloudflare has this thing, this kind of, it's Cloudflare. I was really impressed with this. It was hard to type up here. All right, local, okay, yeah. Cloudflare has, Cloudflare has durable objects. And this was a big thing that I was interested in, because I was joining my team, it was about collaborative editing and stuff like that. And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna see what collaborative editing is like. And so what you could do, I thought this was really cool, is you can, they have these things called durable objects, I don't know if y'all know about this, but you just instantiate a JavaScript class in Cloudflare, and it will hold onto the state of an object, really super low latency. And so, if I go over to Safari, which I had up five seconds ago. Then, so right, so if I, yeah. Okay, so here we go, two browsers, and I thought this was cool. So if I open up this, and what's really cool to write from an application perspective is that this is actually happening in Valencia, right? So I do something in one, it affects the other. So it's webhooks, I've got a session with Cloudflare, I've got webhooks sending down so people can co-ed it, right? I thought this was really powerful, and this is really tiny, and this is Rust and WebAssembly. So that was also really cool. And it was before I joined the team, so there's nothing to do with it, what Adobe actually does. I thought that was really cool, and then the last one is, the last one is Kristoff Broving. He was here yesterday, but he's from BMW, and he came up with a WasmCloud, Onyx, and TensorFlow inference. And so that actually is something, when I was going around, I was talking to people, and they're like, well, we have this really heavy compute thing that sounds like it would be good for Wasm. And it's like, well, actually multi-processing, not so great in Wasm, so no. And the other one was, well, we've got all these machine learning models, can we run them on the edge? And it's kind of the answer's no, right? But that's really a compelling, that's probably the most compelling use cases right here, because let's say, actually, if you have Acrobat on your phone, and you open a PDF, it will actually run it through a machine learning inference, and it will reposition the text and images, and it'll all show nicely on your phone. But the problem is that you need to have a nice phone for that to work for you. And if you don't have a nice phone, hopefully, this is okay to mention, sometimes that has to be done somewhere else, so that has to be done on server side. So if you could run it all at the edge in all the major cities around the world, it would be a big, big win, right? And so, so this is, I don't know, BMW must need it for cars or something, but we, you know, Adobe, and probably lots of people like Adobe could really take advantage of this. If that makes any sense. And so, so this particular one is we give it an image and it spits out a content authenticity fingerprint of an image. So it's gonna spin this up, and I'm gonna give it an image and it's gonna give me a fingerprint if everything goes well. Okay. Yeah, that's what's gonna give me hopefully. All right, there it goes. Okay, cool. So there we go. So that's actually running machine inference on my local host, but that's the kind of thing we need is to be able to run Onyx models or TensorFlow models at the edge. Of course, it's not running at the edge, it's running on my laptop, but same idea. So that really, and the problem we're really trying to solve there is that you have an Onyx model or TensorFlow model, it's too big for a good browser experience and there's too much latency if it goes all the way to a server halfway around the world. So that's, so those are the demos. I'll try to get PowerPoint back up here. Let's see. Okay. So yeah, and so that last one I didn't have much to do with that was Christopher Bruving and Steve Schotler from Cosmonic who did most of that, but that was an actual Adobe use case. So yeah, so pretty quickly, and this is something, if you have customers, if you're writing a platform and you have customers, things to make sure they understand, right? So, if they've got stuff working in V8, it's probably not gonna work in Lazy. And then there was all these things like, oh, well, here's an image, here's some machine learning, could you run that? Here's just a simple image manipulation Tesseract library. Nope, right, no, it doesn't work. The other big thing is, there's no doubt that a wazzy-based workload is gonna run much faster than Java, but you know what else runs much faster than Java? Especially in starting up anything else, and yet people use it, right? I mean, people still use Java in Docker containers at a massive scale. So the whole like, well, it's gonna be faster and cheaper and you're gonna save money, doesn't work. It's not a valid argument. So you have to kind of like, next level, right? Like, well, it's gonna let you do things you couldn't do before. Cause you know, the thing is, if you have hundreds or thousands of engineers and they all write Java, that's gonna take a really, it's gonna, you have to save a lot of money to make it worth retraining thousands of people. And so the whole single-threaded wazzy, not great, like not, I know that we kind of got it working in the browser with the dynamic threads, but sooner the better on how to kind of get around that problem. And also the other big thing is that it doesn't, it's a major, major shift in thinking. So, and of course, it has to work in Kubernetes cause that's what people run, right? Until you have something where, where you know, really next level where it's like, well, it's in the data center and it's everywhere, right? It's in your, you know, local cell tower. People are gonna want it to run in Kubernetes. And so this is from Taylor, I don't know if Taylor's still here, thanks Taylor. Thanks for this diagram, Taylor. But it's hard, it's a lot, and but actually what's really cool here in Wasm Cloud, if you notice, is that you can connect to AWS resources. So that's another must have, right? AWS and Azure, Microsoft people, make sure that you know, have some sort of identity system. Okay. But you know, the really compelling things again, isolation of workloads, no host operating system.  It has to run in corporate accounts, right? Corporate data centers, AWS, Azure, has to have some sort of identity tie in. So we actually, for FedRAMP, we had to use, we went with Spiffy for certain identities, that kind of thing. Like people have spent a lot of time and money working on solving problems with this stuff. So it has to still use this stuff. And of course the machine learning, super, super important. Because companies have spent a lot of money on machine learning, I don't know if you noticed, you know, there's a lot of work being done on machine learning and sometimes it pays off. So they wanna keep that stuff. And once again, I know Bailey started us off with, like, people have this misconception about Rust, but he's like, yeah, if you were gonna start Greenfield, you should write in Rust. We obviously, Adobe uses C++ for all of its web assembly, but, and then the other thing is that, for reasons that I don't really quite understand, but I have pretty good ideas about, the large infrastructure as a service providers are a little behind the eight ball on this stuff. I think it's because you have these different silos, going back to the first slide, right? It's a lot of stuff kind of converging in one place. And so if these big, you know what I mean, these big cloud vendors, they've got lots of silos, and it's really, well, is it Lambda at edge, right? Is it Lambda? Is it the IoT people, right? I don't know if those people talk to each other, but so I think there's a real opportunity for a lot of you here to challenge, you know, to really carve an itch here. And you know, take care of that. Take advantage of the portability, make something that's really everywhere at one time. So, time. Am I about done? Five, 15? So yeah, so anyway, just sum it up. Edge workers, I think this is really, the time is now, this stuff's really ready to go. I think you're gonna see a lot of people using this stuff very soon if they already are, but I think you're gonna see at the top of the adoption curve, especially as they kind of turn up the compute, right? Right now it's still pretty compute limited, but once they can make it a little more powerful, then there's gonna be a lot of adoption. I really like Durable Objects. I know it's not gonna work at an open source conference, but I guess the way it would work is, Durable Objects are good, but let's make an open source version of them. How about that? Server-side WebAssembly, I think, so yeah, so it works for the really trivial cases, and it's gonna work really soon for more complex cases, but it's still kind of challenging. I think eventually it's gonna be its own platform, it's people aren't gonna be running in Kubernetes, because as we all know, it doesn't play well with Kubernetes. And this was true a year ago, it's less true now, but we're looking forward to the future of kind of a seamless experience. I think the last talk kind of talked about that, so and it's definitely gonna be a thing. Wasm will be a major player on the server side for what, that's my two cents. All right, so that is all, thank you very much. Any questions? Thank you.


The research evaluated the adjuvantability of PCPI, a natural plant polysaccharide derived from poria cocos, in enhancing the immunogenicity and protection of an anthrax vaccine using the anthrax protective antigen, PA, as a model. PCPI significantly increased anti-PA antibodies, toxin-neutralizing antibodies, anti-PA antibody affinity, IgG1 and IgG2 are levels, and the frequency of PA-specific memory B cells, proliferation of PA-specific splenocytes, Illinois, for secretion, and DC activation in vitro. The combination of PCPI and CPG-enhanced anti-PA antibodies and neutralizing antibodies, particularly PA-specific IgG2a, shifted the TH2, biased to a TH1, TH2-balanced response, and improved the survival rate of immunized mice following challenge with the anthrax lethal toxin. These findings suggest that PCPI may be a promising vaccine adjuvant that warrants further study. This article was authored by Kuan Liu, Yin Yin, Zhang Zhong, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.