If you can hunt down this dog cat and kill Quantum Computing for good than there will be a mighty big reward waiting for you.  Scott Aaronson put up a bounty of $100,000.  All you have to do is prove that universal Quantum Computing is impossible in the real world.

On the surface there are a couple of surprises here:  Scott doesn’t really hate quantum computing – he’s actually basing his academic career on it. And herein lies the rub for the even bigger surprise: This academic really knows how to create one heck of a marketing stunt.  His blog was already flooded after slashdot reported on this and more media is now jumping on the bandwagon.  This is an awful lot of free publicity for a marketing budget of exactly zero dimes (and this cost includes the net present value of the bounty money).

Hat’s off!