Google Wants You to Run a Quantum Computer
Google has released The Qubit Game to let people run quantum computers in their browsers.
Google developed The Qubit Game with Doublespeak Games and released it on April 14 in celebration of World Quantum Day, 9to5Google reports. (A holiday that would probably be quite different if only more people would observe it.) The game is still up at time of writing.
The Qubit Game is deceptively simple at first. It tasks players with using their cursor to keep heat, represented as jagged red balls, from qubits that want nothing more than to cohere so they can retain information for later retrieval. But things get more complicated pretty quickly.
A few minutes into the game, I built my first analogue signal upgrade, which allows players to interact with every qubit at once by calibrating their machine to a specific waveform. That was followed a few minutes later by a digital computer and then quantum algorithms I still don't get.
The Qubit Game also hammers players with cosmic rays—represented here as more balls of heat than anyone could reasonably be expected to handle—from time to time. What started as a simple game eventually became an organizational nightmare I could scarcely pull away from.
All of the game's mechanics illustrate how companies like Google are working to build quantum computers. There's a stark difference between deflecting balls of heat with a mouse cursor and creating legitimate cooling elements, of course, but this hands-on experience is still edifying.
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