Making Quantum Mechanics Intuitive

Richard Feynman might have been the most quotable, but he was by no means the only scientist to comment on the apparently non-intuitive behavior of the quantum realm. For years, the behavior of matter at quantum scales was considered so far from our everyday experience that having an intuitive understanding of the discipline is deemed impossible by most.

However, there are those who disagree and are out to prove it, by developing different games that function using quantum rules. If someone with no mathematical knowledge of quantum mechanics can develop a winning strategy for any of these games, can we really still believe they haven't developed a quantum intuition themselves?

Meqanic

In Meqanic, you're given a set of blocks to play with and modify the qubit represented on screen using colors (red and blue) and their opacity. Without guidance, you must solve increasingly complex puzzles and in doing so, you will be constructing you own knowledge about how the different blocks work.

In reality, you're actually learning to get a intuitive grasp of how real quantum gates operate!

You can download meqanic from the App Store or you can check out their site for more info by clicking the link down below.

Quantum Chess

Created by Chris Cantwell (USC) and Spiros Michalakis (Caltech) back in 2015, quantum chess is a variation of classical chess which includes the possibility to make quantum moves. You might have heard of it back in 2016, when a video of a match between Paul Rudd and Stephen Hawking went viral.

In quantum chess, your board exists in a superposition of board states, which multiply the more quantum moves you choose to make. The game also introduces quantum measurements, which take care of double-occupancy, and replace the classical capture of a piece. 

So if the complexity of regular chess is not enough of a challenge for you, click the link down below to take the plunge and try the quantum version or go download it on Steam.

qCraft

qCraft is a mod to be played with the popular PC game Minecraft. In classical Minecraft, you mine different types of blocks and use those to build around your environment. In qCraft, however, you can also mine quantum blocks!

Even though, due to its complexity, qCraft can't simulate a fully quantum environment, it can let you create analogies of important quantum phenomena, namely: observation, superposition and entanglement.