Quantum Realm Games

We’ve rebuilt our quantum game engine, generalized it, and we’ve been building tooling for Unity to enable game devs to make their own quantum games. We wanted to “take it out on the track”, so we downloaded a Platformer and added some quantum effects in under an hour instead of days. 100 points to your house if you can name the effects we’re using.

#QuantumGames #Design Episode 2 ?? Do you know what we’re going to do now? That’s right, talk about predicting the future (how did you know?)! ?? Let’s introduce a word that’s shorter than "representing reality": model. When we break something down into attributes that we care about and quantify their properties, we’ve gone halfway to creating a model of it. A model of reality. It’s not reality—the thing itself—it’s just a simplification of it. Like a picture. ??? The last picture you took on your phone is a nice model of reality, and it’s already broken down into attributes that we can talk about computationally. ??? The picture has a definite size (height and width) and a bunch of colors. ?? Now, when you look at your phone, your brain ?? is already doing really sophisticated processing and seeing things that we can replicate computationally. ?? The screen on your phone is made up of something called pixels. A pixel is a tiny lamp that can display an astonishing number of colors (frequencies of light). ?? Your phone has a finite number of pixels lined up in rows and columns (height and width). So, when you took that picture, your phone captured information that we can use to turn each pixel on to a specific color, so that when you look at your phone you see the image. ?? Hey! Row 302! Yep, you! Turn column 1847 to color 4,407,786. Thank you! ?? Just like with the Middle C example from the previous episode, you can now share this picture with your 10,000 closest friends just by sending the information about it rather than having to print it to photographic paper using some serious chemicals. ??? Okay, but, I promised predicting the future! Here’s where the real power of computers comes in. Instead of having to actually do things in the real world, we can figure out how the information about a thing changes as we transition from one reality to another. ?? “Wait, what?” That’s where we’ll start the next post. Stay tuned! ?? #QuantumComputing #Games #GameDesign

Thanks to Donn Silberman for inviting us to speak to the QED-C committee on Workforce Development today! Because our work is truly quantum*, we talked about the role of games as a platform to build familiarity with quantum concepts: - Intuition and experience - Quantum-aware AI for opponents - An opportunity to build quantum things outside of the lab Nice to meet you all (Mike Bennett, Christopher Bishop, Celia Merzbacher, et al)! * Under the hood, all of our game mechanics are unitary operations on matricies. That's one ingredient in the "secret sauce" that enables us to run our software on a quantum computer.

For our friends in Europe...

?? Get ready for the ultimate fusion of creativity and cutting-edge science! We’re hosting a quantum game jam with Laguna College of Art and Design, Caltech's Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, and Indie Game Academy! ?? Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/gBptVH_b ?? Find out more: https://lnkd.in/gg_eBxWC Game developers, designers, quantum enthusiasts, and physicists will come together to create games powered by the mind-bending possibilities of quantum mechanics! ???? Whether you're an experienced game designer, a quantum computing expert, or just curious about how the two worlds collide, this is your chance to dive in, collaborate, and bring something truly unique to life. ??? ?? Applications Open: October 7 ?? Acceptance: October 20th – 22nd ?? Prep Workshop: Nov 2 – 3 (Saturday and Sunday) ?? Game Jam: Nov 1st – 9th ?? Location: Virtual, but you can drop-in at LCAD if you’re in the area. ?? Who Can Join? Game developers of all levels Quantum computing enthusiasts Artists, designers, and storytellers Anyone excited about innovation! ?? What’s in it for you? Prizes for the most innovative games ?? Create groundbreaking quantum-based games Access to expert mentorship and resources Why Quantum Games? Quantum physics allows particles to exist in multiple states simultaneously, altering reality across dimensions. While it’s hard to grasp, it can create thrilling, mind-bending experiences for players. Imagine being a “Dimensional Navigator,” traveling through parallel worlds, each shaped by infinite choices. Your actions in one universe affect countless others. Quantum mechanics is reshaping the future of technology, and games are one of the most creative ways to explore these new frontiers. From quantum superposition to phase rotation, your game could be the next step in introducing quantum concepts to the world through play! ???? Quantum games offer a new frontier for game design. Quantum physicists will guide you, equipping you with the knowledge to push the boundaries of gaming. Be at the forefront of this groundbreaking journey! Ready to take on the challenge? Join us and unlock the possibilities of quantum gaming! Why are we doing this? We’ve been working on a new quantum game library and Unity Plug-in. This will be our first field test. #QuantumGameJam #QuantumComputing #GameDevelopment #Innovation #GameJam #QuantumGames #GameDesign #lcad #caltech #iqim #indiegameacademy

#QuantumGames #Design Episode 1 We can’t talk about quantum games unless we talk about computer games, and we can’t really talk about computer games unless we understand how computers work. Computers aren’t that complicated. If they were, nobody would own one! ?? “I think that there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, President of IBM, 1943 ?? “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 Let’s start at the bottom of the rabbit hole–computers only do two things: they represent the world ?? and they predict the future ??. Representing the world is about information. Everything that you can perceive can be assigned a set of attributes, and those attributes can be given a range of values. If we agree on a set of values for given attributes, then we can share information about our perceptions—with each other and with computers. Imagine you made your dad a clay mug for Father’s Day. ?? After shaping and baking the mug, you glazed it in some color. ?? Color became an attribute of the mug. We can assign a value to it any way we want, and now we have information about it. That green you chose might be # 17049 in the glaze manufacturer’s catalog. ?? Let’s try again. Did you hear that sound? ?? Those were waves of compressed air hitting your eardrum. ?? The time from one wave to the next (period) determines the pitch of the sound that you heard. ?? The shorter the period, the more frequent the compressed air tickles your ear drum, the higher the pitch. Pitch = attribute. Frequency = value. Assume that we measure the frequency, and it turns out that the waves are hitting your ear 261.63 times per second. If you want me to hear what you hear, you can just tell me to make my speakers vibrate at that frequency, and our ears will have received the same sound. ???? (Middle C; whether we heard the same thing is a different discussion for a different time!) Congratulations, you’ve just represented reality using numbers. ?? Don’t worry, we’re going to do it again, next week, with a new example when we get to predicting the future! ?? #GameDesign #QuantumComputing #Innovation #Quantum

Are you ready for the next step in electronic games? ?? It’s time that your thumbs got involved in the quantum revolution. ?? On Thursday, we’re starting a series of posts about quantum game design. We didn’t just stick the word “Quantum” in front of games and hope to ride the hype train to fame and riches. We’ve already published the world’s first commercially available quantum game. The game allows you to experience quantum effects through play. Instead of trying to solve circuit puzzles, we baked quantum effects into the game mechanics. And we’re building more! We want to help you build them too. We’re going to teach you what we know about designing quantum games. Don’t worry, the math is all grade-school level, so regardless of your relationship to math, you’ll fit right in. ???? So, how does this work? Under the hood, game engines use a bunch of math to trick the brain into believing that it’s having an experience. ???? Do you know how hard it is to pull a Formula 1 car around a hairpin turn? Or have you swung from one building to another on a spider’s web? No, but you believe you’ve had those experiences. That’s because we can use computers to model gravity, friction, acceleration, and more. The game engine tricks the brain with classical physics, and now we have an engine that can trick the brain with quantum physics too! You probably have (at least) two questions: 1. Don’t we need quantum computers to run quantum games? ?? 2. Isn’t quantum about really tiny things? What does that have to do with me? ?? Some quantum startup CEOs might make you believe that quantum computing is going to solve the world’s problems, like, next week. I’ve got good news and bad news... ?? The bad news: to solve real-world problems, we’re going to need quantum computers that are far more advanced than what we have today. The good news: you can do fun and interesting things with the quantum computers that we have right now. And it doesn’t have to be an abstract puzzle about qubits and gates! Also, the scientists are making great progress, and if you wait until we have fully advanced quantum computers before you start thinking about them, you’ll already be at a disadvantage. ?? So, let’s create some advantages and have fun along the way! Sound good? ?? Subscribe to Quantum Realm Games here or on Twitter, and we’ll get started. #QuantumGames #GameDesign #QuantumComputing #Innovation

Want to inspire someone to step away from the screen? Pick up a copy of The Seeker Chronicles (https://lnkd.in/gfSdJhVG). The art is beautiful, and the game is super easy to understand and start playing. If you're a gamer, don't think twice about this--just try it out (think MTG meets Star Trek). Need a deeper reason? (If not, stop reading here; really.) Learning is not about what you read; it's about what you do and who you do it with. What we think of as "formal education" is just a way of giving language to cognitive processes. There are lots of ways of being successful in formal Education settings. If you're high in trait Conscientiousness, you probably do well because the setting rewards your focus on achieving the goals laid out in the lesson plan. You can be successful by mastering the "form", but that's not essential to mastering the topic. Sadly, we put every teenager through this in high school. Results are mixed. Another way that you can be successful in a formal education setting is when the topic being "taught" unlocks a language for you to describe your experience. It's pretty easy to teach Newton's equations of motion to a kid who's used to throwing a ball. You're really just developing a (mathematical) language to describe what he already knows. That's education that you don't forget. Games like Seeker Chronicles (and Quantum Chess, and Elementary, and Tiq Taq Toe) give people a chance to develop experience and inuition that makes otherwise abstract science topics embodied. It makes them real in a way that a lecture can't; in a way that an online, interactive widget can't. What's special about people like?Hendrik Poulsen Nautrup, Lea Trenkwalder,?Serafine Beugelink,?Chris Cantwell,?Evert van Nieuwenburg, and others is that they're not gamifying learning, they're learnifying gaming.

Doug Strain at Google was kind enough to give us a tour of Google’s quantum computing lab. We were not allowed to take pictures inside, but imagine about 10k-15k square feet of chandeliers, dilution refrigerators, clean rooms, and the constant hum of compressors creating some of the coldest spots in the known universe. Pretty cool. In addition to Chris Cantwell and Ricardo Olenewa, we had Spyridon M., Val (Golin) Daley, CPA, MBA and Larry Gioia. Fun crowd!

Producer Ricardo Olenewa explaining how to use quantum interference in an end-game strategy for Quantum Chess. Thanks for the questions Chunka Mui PwC #EmTech 2024 #quantum #gaming #quantumcomputing