Exploring Gamification in Quantum Computing: The Qubit Factory

Abstract: Gamification of quantum theory can provide new inroads into the subject: by allowing users to experience simulated worlds that manifest obvious quantum behaviors they can potentially build intuition for quantum phenomena. The Qubit Factory is an engineering-style puzzle game based on a gamified quantum circuit simulator that is designed to provide an introduction to qubits and quantum computing, while being approachable to those with no prior background in the area. It introduces an intuitive visual language for representing quantum states, gates and circuits, further enhanced by animations to aid in visualization. The Qubit Factory presents a hierarchy of increasingly difficult tasks for the user to solve, where each task requires the user to construct and run an appropriate classical/quantum circuit built from a small selection of components. Earlier tasks cover the fundamentals of qubits, quantum gates, superpositions and entanglement. Later tasks cover important quantum algorithms and protocols including superdense coding, quantum teleportation, entanglement distillation, classical and quantum error correction, state tomography, the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm, quantum repeaters and more.