If you are vaguely interested in quantum mechanics, you must check out the game Quantum Minesweeper. You might want to start with the video tutorial before you play online.
The game differs from classical Minesweeper in the following ways:
- The board is really a quantum superposition of two boards. It is your goal to figure out the superpositions. It is simplified, as only one kind of phase is allowed.
- There are three different kind of measurements that you can do, each one a limited number of times. The measurements are:
- classical measurement – collapse that can trigger a mine probabilistically. Very risky!
- entropy measurement – it indicates if there is a superposition or not, but doesn’t tell you if there is a mine or not!
- interaction-free measurements – it is very magical, doesn’t collapse the wave function, actually gives you the phase information. Very powerful!
This game is fantastic!
Technical digression:
I have a question that might be a good undergraduate research project for someone interested in quantum information. What is the optimal strategy for the game? That is, if you thought of this game as a kind of state tomography problem, is there a general protocol to extract the state with high fidelity, given the constrains of the number of measurements? To make it more interesting, imagine a version of quantum minesweeper where the boards could have between them any kind of phase, how much harder would solving it be?
—
Give it one last try
til the next
one more
last try.
-A Wilhelm Scream
Minus Two Fish 