Collective Chats: Why Quantum?

For today’s collection of chatlogs the team discuss the history of our decision to tackle Quantum Computing in our first project together. This idea of a quantum computing citizen science gizmo has been in the works for nearly half a year prior to now, so things are covered quite quickly. Hosted with Paul Sztajer (pdyxs) Daniel Keogh (DanielKeogh) and Rob Lee (RobL33), it’s missing an important part of the project, our resident expert Yuval Sanders (yrs).

A bit part of this project’s history stems from Paul’s search for the right problems for Citizen Science. As mentioned Yuval Sanders played a big part in helping to connect the dots. His knowledge of the science was immensely important early on, especially when we were relatively new to the topic.

Even for those of us new to the science there was clear potential in the mechanics that might make this an interesting topic to tinker with. All it would take is to build a working quantum computer. Easy?

Like the project itself, it’s goals have changed a lot in the past 6 months. Somewhere at its core we’re trying to help people tinker with this toolkit, and hopefully learning something along the way, while also avoiding the accidental downfall of all modern economies.

Key to hitting these goals is having the right hook for people new to the topic (or not). Enter the inevitable metaphor to help understand the strangeness of Quantum. Already we’ve been messing about with themes and metaphors, which we will be covering again later, but here we look at the risks and requirements of such a treatment.

There’s a key part missing here that might keep those in the audience new to quantum at arms length: the part where we learn about the science. We’ve had about 6 months of mini tutorials, play tests and independent research. The team are cooking up a crash course in the basics (and no, it’s actually not all that scary!).

Until then please drop a comment below and we’ll try to share the knowledge best we can. Other than that algorithm that brings down the internet. We quite like the internet. It turns out it’s pretty useful.