The object of the final project is to find a recent research article (past year or so) related to the course material, read it carefully, and write a brief (max 1-2 page, or as little as a couple paragraphs) summary of its results, including some indication of how accessible it was (notation, concepts, etc.) based on material covered during the semester. The object is to determine whether you can read and understand a topical research article at least at the 33-50% level, though it might have been incomprehensible at the start of the semester.

[University guidelines, "Due dates for final projects, papers and take home exams are based on class meeting time. Calculate your due date using the chart below", give this class, with start time between 2:00-2:59PM, a min due date of <Thu, 8-Dec-2016 4:30PM>.]

Sample arXiv searches (try them!): Cnot, qubit, GHZ, quantum comput*, teleportation, ... , turn up things such as the list below, but feel free especially to survey references therein, or any other resource.

I had planned plan to winnow a list of suggestions from the roughly 1000 from past two years with comput* or qubit in title (again, have a look), on the basis of "newsworthiness", in this case meaning that most have received some descriptive link from news or blogspace (follow the "blog link" near the bottom of the right margin). But I found too many, and instead will list a very small representative sample that received large numbers of readers, and invite you to suggest more. Some of the more recent ones have also been mentioned in the latest annual Conference on Quantum Information Processing (2016), (program for QIP2017 now up). There is another interesting set of references in the Quantum Algorithm Zoo.

This list is not be meant to be either definitive or truly representative, just a sample — feel free to suggest other possibilities. It is nonetheless an informative part of this assignment to read as many of the abstracts linked below as you can, to get a flavor for the cutting research edge in this field.
[Below this first list is a second shorter list of articles that also turned up, not appropriate for project due to being reviews or slightly off the topic of the course, but may still be very useful to many of you.]

Here is the above-mentioned second list of articles that also turned up as "popular" -- though not appropriate for project due to being reviews or slightly off the topic of the course, some may be useful above and beyond the course: