Google Sparking Interest To Quantum Mechanics With Minecraft 71
jones_supa writes "If you want to find the computer geniuses of tomorrow, you could do worse than to check out which kids are playing Minecraft. In a Google+ post, the Google Quantum A.I. Lab Team says that they've released a mod called qCraft to enable kids (and adults) to play around with blocks that exhibit behaviors like quantum entanglement, superposition and observer dependency. qCraft obviously isn't a perfect scientific simulation, but it's a fun way for players to experience a few parts of quantum mechanics outside of thought experiments or dense textbook examples. The team doesn't know the full potential of what you can make with the mod, but they are excited to see what Minecraft's players can discover."
Hmmm... (Score:1)
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Well you should probably play on play.strongholdcraft.com. Pretty good server, just saying. I don't have the mod I'm just advertising with absolutely not segeuy.
More data mining by the goberment? (Score:1)
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Don't worry, the parents of the dangerous ones are seeing other kids spending untold hours descended into Minecraft and ignoring the real world, and are keeping their own kids from using it.
The Minecraft operators of today will make good lab techs for the kids who are out talking about quantum nature with their dads while building treehouses.
can "do quantum mechanics" at school (Score:3)
two-slit experiment, the three-polarizing filters experiment, an SCR.....many ways to "do quantum mechanics" on a school budget
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Neither the two-slit experiment nor the three-polarizing filters experiment show anything particularly quantum mechanical. Both would work just fine if light were a pure wave. I'm not really sure what experiments you could do with an SCR that would be particularly illuminating about quantum mechanics, but there might be some.
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Wrong. there is a quantum mechanical revealing version of double-slit and polarizing filter experiment that a purely wave-based energy transfer can't explain
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Please go on.
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One runs the experiment in the dark with a photographic film or movable photomultiplier behind the slits, allowing the observation of single photons. The density of the photons exhibits an interference pattern.
I've not done this experiment myself, but remember being told that it was possible using film during high school.
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But you have to have other reasons to believe there are only single photons in order for that experiment to show anything quantum. Without such other information, all you're showing is very low energy waves interfering with each other.
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no it isn't, as I have done it teaching school. Equipmment and supplies less than $40 in today's dollars.....
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How do you know that's releasing single photons and not simply low-amplitude waves?
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How does one release one photon of light at a time in a way that shows a student there's only one photon being released?
As far as putting the detector in front of one hole and seeing the interference disappear, this is exactly what happens with waves. You don't need quantum mechanics to see that effect.
You have yet to show an experiment that shows anything particularly quantum.
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And you can't reasonably do it yourself, as it requires more sophisticated equipment than most people would have.
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Umm.... isn't that what quantum mechanics is about? That everything can be described by a wavefunction (i.e. as a "pure wave?") Even if it weren't so, the three-polarizer experiment is an excellent demonstration of the counterintuitive properties of projections, which is key to understanding QM.
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No. The "wave function" is only tangentially related to the concept of whether light acts like a wave, a particle, or has some kind of duality. It is tangentially related only because as you dig into the quantum mechanical nature of the universe, you end up with this statistical function that we happen to use the word "wave" in its name.
All one shows in those two experiments is that like acts like a wave.
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No. The "wave function" is only tangentially related to the concept of whether light acts like a wave, a particle, or has some kind of duality. It is tangentially related only because as you dig into the quantum mechanical nature of the universe, you end up with this statistical function that we happen to use the word "wave" in its name.
Wow. In the words of Pauli, that is not even wrong.
First off, the wavefunction is not a statistical function. And "wavefunction" includes that "wave" word for a very good reason. You are, I suspect, perfectly capable of reading an introductory quantum mechanics text. You just have chosen not to and yet feel the need to spout nonsense as if you were an expert.
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I have not just read a quantum mechanical text, but got an A in quantum mechanics. Nice snark, but that characterization of the wave function is simply 100% inaccurate.
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But does it work with tennis balls?
Re:can "do quantum mechanics" at school (Score:5, Funny)
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http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Quantum-Superpositions-1.03/lib/Quantum/Superpositions.pm
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I know this is a troll, and I'm being pedantic however...
Higher intelligence is linked to higher rates of drug experimentation and abuse.
Surely you're joking... (Score:1)
... Mr. Feynman. I bet he would've loved this.
educational potential (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a fun exercise to make a computer at the gate level.
Creepers (Score:1)
"a single creeper is a pretty good DOS attack"
So that's what happened to Facebook this morning. I always suspected it was full of creepers...
Palatable? (Score:1, Offtopic)
From the referenced article, "The engineered bacteria, dubbed genetically recoded organisms (GROs), have the added advantage of being resistant to many existing viruses. They are also less likely to escape the lab and survive than conventional genetically modified organisms, which should make them more palatable for commercial use."
I have no intention of palating any such thing.
Re:Palatable? (Score:5, Funny)
You seem to have tunneled across from a neighboring thread.
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Are they adding lorentz contraction and wormholes to minecraft as well?
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This is why Slashdot should allow posters to delete their own posts.
Cool game, not at all quantum (Score:5, Informative)
At first I was quite excited with the idea that someone was able to use quantum mechanical elements in a game. But of course, they were not able to do this. They just created a mod vaguely inspired by quantum mechanics, that helps to perpetuate the myths so beloved by the lay media.
The video linked just shows a dude running around, nothing very interesting. If you search youtube a bit, you can find videos talking about the mechanics they implemented. I found this one [youtube.com], about the basic elements -- observation, superposition, and entanglement --, and this one [youtube.com], with the extremely exciting title "quantum computers and teleportation".
Of course, what they call observation and superposition have nothing to do with the quantum concepts, they are just blocks that are different depending on which direction you look at them, and the "entanglement" block is just a glorifed telephone. Their quantum computer doesn't seem to do anything besides teleportation, which is Star Trek teleportation instead of quantum teleportation [xkcd.com].
Admitedly, these guys set out do to a terribly difficult task: quantum mechanics is a bit subtle, and quite far from games. The only ones I can remember off the top of my mind are the CHSH game [hrcak.srce.hr], which is about as exciting as tic-tac-toe, and a quantum strategy to cheat at bridge [wikipedia.org], which requires you to do a nontrivial amount of maths (and is actually unpublished research =).
They have, nevertheless, failed. The mod looks cool as a game, though.
Re:Cool game, not at all quantum (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering how Minecraft physics are almost laughable even in the Newtonian realm (for example, you can compress/store 27x64 cubic meters of cobblestone into a 1m cube/chest) nitpicking on the implementation of quantum concepts is a waste of time. This isn't intended as a rigorous treatment, it's an introduction to the concepts and how they would impact if they were visible at the macro scale. Personally, I think the implementation of superposition is reasonable - the block is in an undetermined state when it's not being observed and has it's state frozen by observation. Switching states after being observed isn't quite kosher without some other interaction, but I'll live with that for the sake of gaemeplay. Maybe a redstone signal could be required to destabilize the state of the block after being observed. The Observer dependency is a bit more problematic with its directional dependencies, but I can't think of a good way to implement that in a game. In theory we could use redstone as an activator again and selecting the state of the block probabilistically based on available observers and their distance from the block, but that's a fairly complex algorithm to run in realtime, updating every 1/20th of a second (the Minecraft tick/sampling rate) in Java.
The entanglement doesn't seem to properly describe the quantum phenomenon at all. Action at a distance != teleportation. The trouble is a realistic implementation would probably be exploitable in game terms. For example if you have 2 of those entanglement altars (or whatever they are called) and you place a block in one, I would expect to see the same block appear in the other one. Now how do you prevent people from using this to clone valuable blocks like diamond in game? In multiplayer, with 1 player at each "altar" you would have a very tight time sync requirement if both players tried to mine a block in their respective altars simultaneously.
An alternative mod spotlight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HI-keffxmA [youtube.com]
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But...but it's magic!
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they're no at the two places.
the opening to the chest is a teleport to the one place they're at ;). you can't use the items in two places at the same time.
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Come on, Minecraft does not pretend the implement classical physics.
The problem isn't lack of rigour, is that it gives you the wrong intuition. For example, the essential feature that distinguishes superposition from a classical mixture is that there is a basis in which the result of a measurement is deterministic, and from what I have seen this is not the case in the mod.
One way that it could be done: a "superposition" block, that can be prepared in the states |0>, |1>, |+>, or |->. If you look
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moreover, most treasure boxes in most games work in a fashion that what is inside is generated only after you open the box. before that the box can have aything.
Old time quantum computing blogger ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... seems to be rather unimpressed with the idea [wordpress.com]
Is this what they wanted? (Score:5, Funny)
A half-dead blocky cat
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that describes the kind of pussy most geeks get: It's either real but out-of-it, or fake and pixelated.
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How could anyone vote this down? Ah that earlier comment I posted is now regretted so so hard.
Interesting psychological experiment (Score:3)
Here's an interesting possible psychological experiment. If you could design an game that utilized the rules of quantum mechanics, and you exposed young enough kids to it, would quantum mechanics become intuitive to them?
Quantum mechanics always seems so unintuitive. Is that because of nature or nurture? Have our brains evolved to understand a classical world? Or do we develop those intuitions as we experience the world?
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Well, you could say that doing a PhD in physics is playing such a game, and, sure enough, most physicists have a working intuition on how quantum mechanics work -- more on the level of given a description of a situation, they can tell more or less what will happen without doing the calculatios. Doing that part is not hard at all. Heck, this kind of intuition mathematicians develop about the most abstract and artificial objects.
But on a more fundamental level, I don't think it is possible to develop a good i
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You don't need to go as far as quantum physics. Human intuition on physics is very limited. Even something as simple as a toy gyroscope makes no intuitive sense.
MineCraft is a great vehicle to promote this (Score:3)
or really anything...
I made a post for a website on how to get a mob spawner in MineCraft; part of the post included
a 4 second video showing the process. Lots of pictures but one video.
I'd forgotten all about it until the e-mail started and did it come, a 4 second video nobody likes
now has 420K views. I've much better videos, of glitches, all sorts of stuff but none anywhere close to
the reception (views) of this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvxY-9DC2rQ [youtube.com]
Was cool the hate line was red and long, called a saber for the longest time. Ads are not allowed
or seen, practicing what I preach.
Minecraft has a heck of a following of all ages, as it's very simple to learn yet you can get very complex with; it as Google is showing.
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Probably the video got so many dislikes because it's useless. There's no explanation whatsoever, and before you're tuned in your attention to the video, it's over.
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Probably the video got so many dislikes because it's useless. There's no explanation whatsoever, and before you're tuned in your attention to the video, it's over.
Wasn't meant to of been viewed by the public it was part of a post, but I didn't care who saw it.
There was a description that I kept upto date but then I had to follow the website it was posted on.
So many people hit the website only to find you had to join to view it, that that one post was viewable without joining,
so I went with that format. Once again one must join to view the post so I haven't bothered updating it.
Also it was a glitch in either the beta MineCraft or MineCraft and some MOD, you could only
game (Score:1)