14 DAY TRIAL // A few months back, Google, in collaboration with the NASA Ames Research Center, bought a quantum computer from D-Wave. With it, the search giant plans to explore the brave new world of quantum computing and see if it can't fix some of its biggest computing challenges while it's at it.
However, the process is slow. Google made the announcement in May, but it still hasn't actually gotten around to doing too much with it. The US government shutdown, which affected the Ames Research Center where the computer is located, didn't help things.
Still, the company is thinking in the long term and there's no better evidence of that than the fact that it released a Minecraft mod which adds quantum physics elements to the popular game, in the hope that it will inspire the next generation of physicists and computer scientists.
"We talked to our friends at MinecraftEdu and Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter and came up with a fun idea: a Minecraft modpack called qCraft," Google's Quantum A.I. Lab Team announced.
"It lets players experiment with quantum behaviors inside Minecraft’s world, with new blocks that exhibit quantum entanglement, superposition, and observer dependency," it explained.
The purpose of the mod, like that of Google's quantum computer, is to experiment. In both cases, Google doesn't really know what's possible with the tools and the only way to find out is to start trying out things.
In that vein, the mod and the computer are quite similar. As the first quantum computer commercially available, its capabilities are a mystery even to the people who built it. Google has an idea of what the device may be useful for, but experimentation may yield very interesting results.
The skills necessary to explore the capabilities of a system like the quantum computer are, in essence, the same skills necessary to have fun and discover new things in Minecraft.
