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Google Sparking Interest To Quantum Mechanics With Minecraft

Posted by Soulskill on from the get-them-where-they-live dept.

jones_supa writes "If you want to find the computer geniuses of tomorrow, you could do worse than to check out which kids are playing Minecraft. In a Google+ post, the Google Quantum A.I. Lab Team says that they've released a mod called qCraft to enable kids (and adults) to play around with blocks that exhibit behaviors like quantum entanglement, superposition and observer dependency. qCraft obviously isn't a perfect scientific simulation, but it's a fun way for players to experience a few parts of quantum mechanics outside of thought experiments or dense textbook examples. The team doesn't know the full potential of what you can make with the mod, but they are excited to see what Minecraft's players can discover."

14 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. can "do quantum mechanics" at school by rubycodez · · Score: 2

    two-slit experiment, the three-polarizing filters experiment, an SCR.....many ways to "do quantum mechanics" on a school budget

    1. Re:can "do quantum mechanics" at school by Chuckstar · · Score: 2

      Please go on.

    2. Re:can "do quantum mechanics" at school by gijoel · · Score: 5, Funny

      They've already proven that chickens are simultaneously a wave, and a particle.

  2. educational potential by green+is+the+enemy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's a good idea to make Minceraft mods that expose certain laws of physics to interaction, even if not 100% rigorous and realistic. It could become a valuable teaching tool in the future for a large variety of physics and other scientific and engineering concepts. Somehow I feel Markus Persson intended this from the beginning.

    1. Re:educational potential by z4ckpete · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The redpower mod is how I learned how gates work and how they're combined to make RAM, adders, etc. I even made a simple calculator (which is not something I thought I'd have the attention span to do.)

  3. Cool game, not at all quantum by iris-n · · Score: 5, Informative

    At first I was quite excited with the idea that someone was able to use quantum mechanical elements in a game. But of course, they were not able to do this. They just created a mod vaguely inspired by quantum mechanics, that helps to perpetuate the myths so beloved by the lay media.

    The video linked just shows a dude running around, nothing very interesting. If you search youtube a bit, you can find videos talking about the mechanics they implemented. I found this one, about the basic elements -- observation, superposition, and entanglement --, and this one, with the extremely exciting title "quantum computers and teleportation".

    Of course, what they call observation and superposition have nothing to do with the quantum concepts, they are just blocks that are different depending on which direction you look at them, and the "entanglement" block is just a glorifed telephone. Their quantum computer doesn't seem to do anything besides teleportation, which is Star Trek teleportation instead of quantum teleportation.

    Admitedly, these guys set out do to a terribly difficult task: quantum mechanics is a bit subtle, and quite far from games. The only ones I can remember off the top of my mind are the CHSH game, which is about as exciting as tic-tac-toe, and a quantum strategy to cheat at bridge, which requires you to do a nontrivial amount of maths (and is actually unpublished research =).

    They have, nevertheless, failed. The mod looks cool as a game, though.

    --
    entropy happens
    1. Re:Cool game, not at all quantum by bwcbwc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Considering how Minecraft physics are almost laughable even in the Newtonian realm (for example, you can compress/store 27x64 cubic meters of cobblestone into a 1m cube/chest) nitpicking on the implementation of quantum concepts is a waste of time. This isn't intended as a rigorous treatment, it's an introduction to the concepts and how they would impact if they were visible at the macro scale. Personally, I think the implementation of superposition is reasonable - the block is in an undetermined state when it's not being observed and has it's state frozen by observation. Switching states after being observed isn't quite kosher without some other interaction, but I'll live with that for the sake of gaemeplay. Maybe a redstone signal could be required to destabilize the state of the block after being observed. The Observer dependency is a bit more problematic with its directional dependencies, but I can't think of a good way to implement that in a game. In theory we could use redstone as an activator again and selecting the state of the block probabilistically based on available observers and their distance from the block, but that's a fairly complex algorithm to run in realtime, updating every 1/20th of a second (the Minecraft tick/sampling rate) in Java.

      The entanglement doesn't seem to properly describe the quantum phenomenon at all. Action at a distance != teleportation. The trouble is a realistic implementation would probably be exploitable in game terms. For example if you have 2 of those entanglement altars (or whatever they are called) and you place a block in one, I would expect to see the same block appear in the other one. Now how do you prevent people from using this to clone valuable blocks like diamond in game? In multiplayer, with 1 player at each "altar" you would have a very tight time sync requirement if both players tried to mine a block in their respective altars simultaneously.

      An alternative mod spotlight.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HI-keffxmA

      --
      We are the 198 proof..
  4. Old time quantum computing blogger ... by quax · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... seems to be rather unimpressed with the idea

  5. Is this what they wanted? by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Funny

    A half-dead blocky cat

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  6. Interesting psychological experiment by Chuckstar · · Score: 2

    Here's an interesting possible psychological experiment. If you could design an game that utilized the rules of quantum mechanics, and you exposed young enough kids to it, would quantum mechanics become intuitive to them?

    Quantum mechanics always seems so unintuitive. Is that because of nature or nurture? Have our brains evolved to understand a classical world? Or do we develop those intuitions as we experience the world?

    1. Re:Interesting psychological experiment by connor4312 · · Score: 2

      Plain ol' physics can be intuitive enough at times - our brains have not evolved to understand it at all, merely to survive. A very basic example is that the mass of an object does not change its rate of deceleration due to friction. F = ma, Force of friction = mgcos(theta), therefore mgcos(theta) = ma and gcos(theta) = ma. Another is that, despite what is seen in films, a swinging object is more likely to fall at the bottom of its path than the top. I would be very, very, very surprised if there was a game that could make a concept that goes far beyond such basics intuitive to the average person.

    2. Re:Interesting psychological experiment by iris-n · · Score: 2

      Well, you could say that doing a PhD in physics is playing such a game, and, sure enough, most physicists have a working intuition on how quantum mechanics work -- more on the level of given a description of a situation, they can tell more or less what will happen without doing the calculatios. Doing that part is not hard at all. Heck, this kind of intuition mathematicians develop about the most abstract and artificial objects.

      But on a more fundamental level, I don't think it is possible to develop a good intuition, because our brains process information classically; we need well defined bits to reason about. But it might not even make sense to be able to reason quantumly, as the essential feature would be preserving the superposition of the systems we interact with. But to preserve the superposition is to have no memory of the interaction, so... it would be very weird indeed.

      Try to imagine what a quantum computer would feel as it processes quantum information: it can only apply transformations to its information blindly, without ever reading out what its input actually is, until the very end of the calculation -- and even this final measurement only because we, humans, want it, it's perfectly legitimate to never have a final measurement at all.

      I am a physicist, but these are only drunken speculations...

      --
      entropy happens
  7. Re:Palatable? by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Funny

    You seem to have tunneled across from a neighboring thread.

  8. MineCraft is a great vehicle to promote this by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 2

    or really anything...

    I made a post for a website on how to get a mob spawner in MineCraft; part of the post included
    a 4 second video showing the process. Lots of pictures but one video.

    I'd forgotten all about it until the e-mail started and did it come, a 4 second video nobody likes
    now has 420K views. I've much better videos, of glitches, all sorts of stuff but none anywhere close to
    the reception (views) of this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvxY-9DC2rQ

    Was cool the hate line was red and long, called a saber for the longest time. Ads are not allowed
    or seen, practicing what I preach.

    Minecraft has a heck of a following of all ages, as it's very simple to learn yet you can get very complex with; it as Google is showing.