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Comment by bloone | Hacker News Reader

Hey there Scott!

I just wanted to say I wrote a student-paper on quantum computational complexity last year and I felt like your papers made up almost 90% of my references. Thank you for making my learning about the subject possible!

On to my question: I'm working on a capstone project right now that's using quantum computing to create a small video-game. I'm using the 5-qubit quantum experience from IBM and I was wondering if you had any cool ideas/suggestions for small game experiences that could use actual quantum computing resources to teach people about the properties of quantum mechanics?

Thanks again for all your work in understanding the quantum world, Scott.

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That's a tough one! So far, I've only seen ONE game meant to teach quantum mechanics that I thought actually worked, in terms of being (1) actually about QM rather than some vague analogy, and (2) fun to play. It's this one:

http://quantumgame.io/

Notably, this game doesn't even try to teach about entanglement (which, no surprise, is hard to keep track of in your head!). Tt deals only with a single photon passing through a network of beamsplitters and phaseshifters: a situation that has one foot in quantum physics and one foot in classical physics (the macroscopic state of a laser beam obeys exactly the same math). But the puzzles are really clever!

If you're just trying to create an educational game, why bother using the Quantum Experience? Won't it just introduce enormous errors and delays (~30 seconds per run when I tried it), complicating and obfuscating whatever you're trying to teach? Why not just make some puzzles that force people to reason about small, idealized quantum systems, along the lines of the successful example above?

That game is really quite cool, and certainly in the same vein as what I was thinking of doing - thanks so much for the suggestion (I've already spent too much time solving puzzles)!

I am looking at using something like the Quantum Experience for two reasons: 1) Because giving people real quantum computing results is really cool, and 2) Because it's my capstone project and the work has to have a certain threshold of technical exploration. That being said, I'm not well-versed in alternatives that could maybe just simulate quantum properties without having to go through an actual quantum computer.

I have been looking into creating a small quantum neural net (with either real or simulated qubits) to show how that differs from a neural network running on classical computing. I've been trying to work that into a game idea but I'd be lying if I said I've come up with anything compelling yet. If you got any cool game mechanics/ideas you think quantum computing resources would lend themselves to then I'm all ears!

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