One of former UT students came along and submitted this story. He asked me to put it here:
I am so petrified; I don’t know I have to be embarrassed or angry. Therefore, I’m telling you the story, maybe you can help me feel something logical! However, before I begin, I have to mention that I never use the term “University” for the place located in Enghelab avenue. To me, it’s just somewhere to meet people, just like a café. Therefore, I use the terms “University of Tehran” and “Café Tehran” interchangeably.
There was a very low quality talk on “quantum cellular automata” for an M.Sc. thesis in the department of computer science. That is a promising event there, because it shows at least the tradition of giving talk is still alive, howbeit it is cheap! Nevertheless, what made me too angry was the evaluation process by two guys who teach in café Tehran (Neither I use the title “Professor” for them nor “doctor”, since they do not have any profession and their knowledge of computer science is not much beyond what we expect from an undergrad student). Hayedeh Ahrabian and Abbas Nozari were evaluating the thesis, while they didn’t have the minimum information about how quantum computing works! I am pretty sure that they hadn’t even searched the keywords in Wikipedia! As the speaker started his talk Ahrabian started her embarrassing questions too!
Speaker: “Assume a register consist of qudits…”
Ahrabian: “What is a qudit?”
(The question above is like to ask “what is a bit?” in classical computation!)
Speaker: “A qudit is a quantum bit which its Hilbert space is d-dimensional. Now, assume a register consist of qudits…”
Ahrabian: “Just a moment! What is that sigma in your slide?”
“Gosh! I am saying! JUST WAIT A FEW SECONDS!”
“No! That’s a question! What is that sigma?”
“ALRIGHT, IT’S YOUR ALPHABET! NOW, ASSUME A REGISTER, CONSIST OF QUDITS!” Blah blah blah…
After a short while Nozari started: “But in quantum computation you are not allowed to do measurement until the end of the computation. How do you read your register?”
(This is totally an irrelevant question, because nobody talked about measurement here!)
Speaker: “We do not measure the qubits here. That’s just applying unitary operations.”
Nozari: “If you say you don’t measure, then tell me how do you read the register?”
“As I said before, I am not reading the data here.”
But Nozari is not the one who passes by the matter unless he understands it as well! This is generally a good habit, but not when you don’t know even the basics and you are evaluating a thesis in that topic! It took a while until the student’s supervisor came in: “Mister Doctor, (this funny term is used in Iran for calling the people who hold a PhD degree!) let’s see the problem from another point of view…” They talked a lot, but at the end nobody was satisfied!
The talk continued with Ahrabian’s foolish questions every ten seconds! Once she said: “Did you do all of these on your own?” She meant why don’t you give any reference! And when she received the negative answer she said while laughing: “I thought that you are clever and invented these all! Ha-ha!” … What do you think? Anyone can come up with a new scientific idea if he is not as stupid as you! I was angry to think that these jackasses are pissing the Iranian educational system off and drawing the students off the scientific activities.
However, at the time of any failure they point to the students and people believe them! I couldn’t bare this. I turned backward in the opposite direction of classroom in my seat!
They kept on discussing bullshit stuff until the end and they finalized as such:
Speaker: “Any question?”
An audience: “What are the advantages of this model in comparison with the circuit model?”
Speaker: “Good question. Umm…”
Suddenly Ahrabian jumped in with her both feet and said: “It does not have any meaning to say there are advantages over two computational models. They are equivalent!!!”
OH MY GOD! I thought you do have a little insight at least on classical computation!
