Quantum chess

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Quantum chess is a variant of chess that supplements the board game with principles from quantum mechanics . It was originally developed by Selim Akl, director of the Queen's School of Computing at Queen's University of Canada .

It gained greater public fame after being revised by Chris Cantwell at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). To mark the opening of a series of lectures on quantum science, on January 26, 2016 the institute presented the video recording of a game by physicist Stephen Hawking with film producer and actor Paul Rudd .

history

Selim Akl, the inventor of the first variant of the game, explained the advantages and motivations behind the invention of the game in 2010 in a scientific article about restoring the balance between people and computers in the game of chess. To do this, he had transferred the superposition of quantum mechanics to the game of chess in such a way that there were no more precisely defined pieces. Each piece was king, queen, pawn, rook, knight and bishop at the same time. In the classic game of chess, since Deep Blue had won against Garry Kasparov in May 1997 , computers have proven to be more and more superior to human opponents at increasing speed due to the processing of enormous amounts of data. Several students and scientists from Queens University subsequently worked on implementing the idea as a computer game as part of their studies.

In 2014, as a doctoral student in computer science, Chris Cantwell came across Selim Akl's quantum chess while researching his study project and developed his own prototype. His doctoral supervisor put him in touch with Spiros Michalakis , who had previously worked at Google on “qCraft”, a modification of the Minecraft computer game with the aim of adding quantum mechanics to it. In the following year, with weekly meetings with Michalakis, Cantwell developed his study project to a final version and he planned to publicly present the game as "Quantum Chess" at a lecture series on quantum mechanics at Caltech in early 2016. He had retained the basic idea of ​​superposition as an influencing factor, but otherwise simplified the rules of the game significantly.

On January 26, 2016, a science night in honor of Richard Feynman's theory took place in the Institute's Beckman Auditorium under the motto “One Entangled Evening” . John Preskill of Caltech, Nobel laureate David Wineland and the developer Krysta Svore of Microsoft moderated the evening, the highlights of which the video "Anyone can Quantum" was one that a lot quantum chess between the physicist Stephen Hawking and the filmmaker and actor Paul Rudd shows . Paul Rudd was particularly popular at the time for his role in the film adaptation of the Marvel comic book Ant-Man . The film had only hit theaters a few months earlier. Actor Keanu Reeves accompanied the video as narrator . Its prominent cast brought the video some press attention and after it was published on the YouTube video platform , it received more than 1.6 million views in its first week.

It was planned to appear as a commercial quantum chess video game in 2017. To finance this, Chris Cantwell started a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com , which was looking for supporters until March 3, 2016 and was able to achieve and even slightly exceed the target of 30,000 US dollars , so that a quantum chess actually took place on February 28, 2017 Game was released on Steam .

Rules and differences to the classic chess game

The basic rules of the game of chess were adopted by the developer of quantum chess. All pieces move normally and the goal is to checkmate the opposing king. However, the rules are supplemented by some quantum mechanical principles:

Quantum trains and superposition

As an alternative to normal chess moves, all pieces except the pawns can make so-called "quantum moves" in quantum chess. When a figure makes a quantum move, it gets into a superposition. This means that there are now two different but equally likely ways in which the game can be continued:

  1. There is a 50% chance that the figure can make up to two moves in a row.
  2. There is also a 50% probability that the figure does not move at all, i.e. it remains on the space it was on before the quantum move.

Since the principle of superposition in the game is based on Schrödinger's cat , the players do not find out which of the two possibilities actually occurs. Instead, the figure continues to exist in a superposition on several fields at the same time. Since the location of a certain figure can no longer be determined exactly after a quantum move has been carried out, it is also possible, for example, for figures to pass through other figures that are in a superposition.

End of superposition

A superposition continues until a clear determination of the position of a figure is unavoidable, as otherwise a game could not be continued clearly. This can only be achieved by occupying a space with two figures (since you can move through figures in superposition, it is also possible to move onto spaces where there may be another figure). In this case a Conflict Measurement is carried out, which determines which figure comes to a stop on the field in question. The other figure disappears from the field in question. If this piece was in a superposition, the conflict measurement also decides whether it was actually on the square from which it disappeared or whether it still exists on another square on the board. So you can't hit pieces with the help of a quantum move, you can only force a conflict measurement.

Special features of checkmate

In contrast to established chess, in quantum chess not only the checkmate is the goal of every player, but also the capture of the opposing king. If a checkmate occurs, it ends the game immediately, but reaching a checkmate position is made more difficult by the fact that the opposing king has to be checkmated 100%. If the opposing king is in a superposition, his exact position must first be found out by conflict measurement. A mate position like in the established chess game is very difficult in quantum chess and can only be achieved with pieces that are not in a superposition. The much simpler way is to move a quantum move onto the square on which the opposing king is standing and thus force a conflict measurement. In this case, however, victory is not guaranteed, because the figure may not be able to make this move.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Selim G. Akl: On the Importance of being Quantum (PDF; 156 kB). Technical Report. No. 2010-568, Queen's University, February 16, 2010, accessed March 2, 2016.
  2. ↑ Emiliy Chung: Quantum physics adds twist to chess . In: CBC News , September 6, 2010, accessed March 2, 2016
  3. ↑ Chris Cantwell: How Quantum Chess came to be - Demystifying the Quantum World Through Play ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), Developer Blog of the Inventor, February 3, 2016, accessed on March 3, 2016 (English)
  4. ↑ Chris Cantwell: Quantum Chess , on the Quantum Frontiers blog page of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, February 15, 2016, accessed on March 2, 2016 (English)
  5. ^ Sophie Bushwick: Watch Paul Rudd Battle Stephen Hawking In Quantum Chess . In: Popular Science , January 27, 2016, accessed March 2, 2016
  6. ↑ "Quantum Chess": Nerdy chess game for Stephen Hawking and everyone . In: Der Standard , February 3, 2016, accessed March 2, 2016
  7. ↑ a b Quantum Chess - #QuantumChess , project page on kickstarter.com , accessed on March 2, 2016 (English)
  8. ↑ Quantum Chess on Steam Product Page in the Steam Store, accessed March 24, 2020