“When it comes to quantum programming, people think, ‘Whoa, it's some weird, magical thing done by weird magical people’. And then I say, ‘Well, I made battleships on a quantum computer’.”
James Wootton is excited. He always gets excited when it comes to quantum computing or game design – but especially when he gets to do both. Next week, he’s going to do just that, all while sitting on a Ferris wheel in central Helsinki, in sub-zero mid-February temperatures. After a tour on the wheel, he’ll chuck his laptop aside and dive straight into the thick steam of a Finnish sauna.
Wootton, an IBM quantum computing physicist and programmer, will be amongst the attendees at this year’s Quantum Game Jam – a peculiar event that, on the weekend of February 16 to 17, will blend a crowd of game developers and quantum physicists with one single goal: creating video games on a five and 16-qubit IBM quantum computer.
They have two venues to do their programming: Helsinki’s most popular sauna with an open-air swimming pool, the Sea Allas Pool, or sitting in a pod on the Helsinki Skywheel. “Relaxing while you create games is part of the deal, that's how you get the best out of the ideas you want to create,” says one of the organisers, Annakaisa Kultima. “The wheel we use for inspiration, as long as it is not -25C on that day.” At the bottom of the wheel, in a hut, a quantum physicist will be answering the public’s questions about the weird world of quantum mechanics.
While quantum computers are hyped to one day dramatically change our lives, at the moment they struggle to perform better than traditional computers. If and when they do – achieving the so-called quantum advantage – their applications might range from the discovery of new drugs and exotic materials to finding new ways to model financial data, making machine learning more powerful and entirely new forms of encryption.
The unusual location choice isn’t a first: previous quantum game jams have taken place at an astronomical observatory, at a science exhibition with full dome projectors and at a quantum lab. While the Helsinki Quantum Game Jam has been going on since 2014, this year for the first time developers will be making games using a real prototype quantum computer – accessing the IBM Quantum Experience (or Q Experience for short) at the tech giant’s quantum lab in New York via the cloud. Q Experience is a programme that puts IBM quantum computers on the cloud, giving developers and scientists an opportunity to tinker with the quantum world.
The total cost of the jam is around €20,000, according to the organisers. When the jams first started five years ago, Kultima says the initial goal was to bring game developers and quantum physicists closer and “provide a space to explore the playful potential that games and quantum can create”, both in person in Helsinki and remotely, developing games with participants in Denmark, Brazil and elsewhere. This year though, it’s all happening in Helsinki.
A number of high-profile game developers and jammers are expected to attend, including developers from Epic Games Helsinki, Housemarque and Supercell. One hardcore jammer, Samuli Jääskeläinen who’s a developer at Varjo, a Finnish VR company, has bagged more than 60 game jams to date.
Gamers will use Qiskit – short for Quantum Information Science Kit – the open source framework launched in 2017 and based on IBM's quantum computing programme, which has opened up access to quantum computing in the cloud for everyone.
Crucially, says Wootton, knowledge of quantum mechanics isn’t necessary to create a game. He started designing games on quantum computers a couple of years ago – and jam participants, he says, will take his projects and those of other physicists, and reproduce them in a few lines of code – with no expertise in quantum. “But more importantly, they can use them to create their own new projects,” Wootton says.
So how do you make a game on a quantum computer? If you’re into game design, you probably use a programming language such as Python, which works with bits – ones and zeros – that store memory on a standard computer. To create, say, the Battleship game on a quantum computer, you first need a grid of qubits – fragile quantum bits that can be in a superposition of a zero and a one state. This way, the ‘zero’ state could be associated with ‘sunk’ and the ‘one’ with ‘intact’. Then, the designer will use specific quantum operations to flip the qubit from zero to one, to represent the other player’s attack.
On a classical computer, the ship is either hit or not – there’s no in-between. But on a quantum one, because of the superposition of states, it’s possible to have ships take a few hits before they get destroyed – because “you're going through a few steps of superposition states,” says Wootton.
One problem all quantum computers currently in development face – be it by IBM, Google, Intel, Microsoft or a number of academic labs and startups – is noise. That’s when qubits get corrupted from any kind of slightest interaction with the environment, because of heat, vibration, sound, you name it. “It means that when you read out a qubit, even if it's solidly zero, sometimes it says it's a one,” says Wootton.
Noise is a huge problem when it comes to trying to get quantum computers to outperform classical computers. Researchers are working hard on reducing the noise level and then error-correcting the qubits, but that’s incredibly fiddly. For game designers, though, noise can come in handy. They can use it to represent little bits of weirdness, says Wootton – like bizarre weather effects (say, a tsunami) that may cause your ship to be a little bit more damaged than it should have been otherwise. “Even if the opposing player hasn't attacked you enough, noise might push you over the edge,” he explains. “Say you've had a few torpedoes, and it's not enough to sink you, but the noise has struck you with a lightning bolt, so you're going to sink anyway.”
At the end, once a video game is created, players won’t necessarily know it has been made on a quantum computer. And with quantum computing getting more and more sophisticated, quantum games may well be the first area where a quantum computer finally achieves quantum advantage.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
