Minecraft, But On a Quantum Computer

Yo guys you ever load up one of those procedurally generated games and are stuck sitting for a while while it generates a new world for you only for it to sometimes generate patterns that you feel like you’ve seen in every other game that does this

Well it’s always been a dream of mine to generate truly one-of-a-kind but fully explorable complex worlds and at lightning speeds but you see this as i envision it is something that only a quantum computer can do because even some of the fastest computers that we have struggle with trying to generate these complex

Worlds but thankfully today’s video is sponsored by kiskit which means we get to try and make one of my long lasting dreams come true because not only does kiskit have quantum computers according to some sources kiskit which is a quantum team within ibm is leading the race on quantum computing

And hey it makes sense to me man they’ve open sourced their quantum computers they’ve made such expensive technology free for people like you and i to play around with so as far as i’m concerned yo kiss kit lead on lead on but to get started with today’s project

I’m gonna first need to know the basics of quantum mechanics because without that how can i expect to be able to understand how to program for a quantum computer uh oh right i should probably explain what kiskit is well kiskit is a tool that allows even us bedroom developers to write quantum

Computing algorithms and run those algorithms on in real life quantum computers and get all the new age benefits that quantum computers offers like massive speed ups entanglement parallelization and more but you see there’s a bit of a problem quantum computing is still really new and writing a quantum algorithm is a bit tricky

But thankfully kisket has an amazing ui that helps make writing quantum algorithms really simple look at these pretty graphics look at them believe it or not but what you’re looking at is a quantum algorithm and what i loved about learning how to write quantum algorithms through kiskit is

They have a lot of really good resources that really helps give intuition on what’s going on and kiskit is written in python and because we’re friends i’m going to give you a bit of a cheat sheet the challenge writing quantum algorithms is basically just doing a bunch of

Mathematical rotations on a qubit and if you can figure out how to rotate a collection of qubits with a certain touch let’s just say you can make some really magical things happen but this is not about to be a walk in the park but then again

I mean i used to edit for physics girl i even edited both of the episodes she did on quantum mechanics and what i remember from those experiences is that um two states uh particle wave uh okay all right all right fine i’ll do my research okay okay okay all right

We’re now about three weeks in and i still really haven’t done anything with the quantum computer yet other than just watch numerous videos and articles on quantum mechanics and do about a million hello quantum world projects with kiskit’s resources i now have a much better understanding on both quantum mechanics and quantum

Computing and i’m officially ready to begin pulling out my hair from all the quantum bugs we will eventually create So look we need to start here this is a single house that is generated using the minecraft method and if we were to generate a couple more in this area we would have a small town generate the world everyone cool great i mean it gets the point across but you see

Minecraft generates houses by selecting one of a few different houses that were all pre-made by humans and they only will place a house on the terrain if the terrain is flat enough now this method is quite common in video games because it’s very simple but also very effective but why i don’t

Like this method is because once you’ve seen a couple of generated houses in minecraft you’ve basically seen them all not to mention this method makes the terrain the most important thing over everything else because that’s simply what’s generated first which means if the terrain is no good

Then the town will be no good as well but we all know damn well that some rough terrain is not going to stop man from conquering it what can i say humans are op but most importantly this method as far as i can imagine it is not compatible with a quantum computer

Trying to figure out how to write a quantum program to generate like this may be extremely hard if not impossible okay listen in the middle of editing this video this was actually proven to work dr james wooten who was actually my ibm point of contact for all the technical quantum computing stuff

Just published an article detailing how he helped a game dev team procedurally generate terrain using a quantum computing simulator very cool i’m no quantum computing expert i still don’t fully understand how quantum algorithms work so you should take everything i tell you with the grain of salt but back to the

Video what we need instead is an algorithm that treats the entire map as one singular piece it treats the map as a true quantum object in which the terrain plants houses buildings roads you name it all have equal value in the eyes of the generation algorithm all working together to make a seamless

But believable map and thankfully we don’t have to search far for this algorithm there is a new very magical generation algorithm called the wave function collapse algorithm created by computer scientist named maxim gooman in 2016 and i personally believe it to be the ultimate generation algorithm of our time

We can feed it a data set to learn from and it will generate whatever we want inspired by that data which makes it a machine learning algorithm but from my experiences with a lot more control this is how it works this map is in what’s called superposition now superposition is

Something that happens in quantum mechanics which just basically means that this map currently exists as every possible map imaginable from the randomly assembled maps all the way to the seamless cohesive maps here’s a bit of idea what a map in superposition would look like though we can never truly visualize a quantum object

I mean einstein called it spooky for a reason anyhow with the wave function collapse algorithm we simply create x amount of states in this example it’s only three the dirt state grass state and nothing state then we give each state very simple rules that they must follow for example

The grass state must have a nothing state above it must have a dirt state under it and must have another grass state on every side of it and when we give rules to all of our states and tell it to generate it will remove all impossible states from the neighbors at this position

Which then will make their neighbors remove impossible states from their possible states and this keeps on going until all positions on the map have exactly one possible state and voila you have a map generated with the aid of quantum mechanics however this algorithm doesn’t become actual magic until you have a giant list

Of possible states create a little data set and feed it to the algorithm to generate beautiful houses like you see here it’s so beautiful in fact i think we need to take a quick montage while i go crying the corner from its beauty but now what really drops draws with

This machine learning algorithm is that we get to do things like this we can simply use the same possible states as before but change the data set from this house that requires flat land to this house that is built into a hill feed it to the algorithm

And it will learn from our data set and generate a whole new type of house i i have no words and of course there is absolutely nothing stopping us from increasing the size of our map to generate a beautiful completely seamless town like this yo you all seeing this now initially i

Plan to add a bunch of different states so that the algorithm can make things like parks and backyards and rooftops and restaurants and stores parking lots things like this but i underestimated just how long it takes to get this whole system set up this single data set map took me

Some good hours to put together mostly due to how terrible the map editor i made was but i mean hey there’s nothing stopping me from adding more and more state to this current map it’s just this is as far as i was able to get for this video

But i have to come clean i have not been honest with you guys and gals generating the individual houses isn’t that big of a deal it took maybe five to ten minutes each but every town that i’ve shown you has taken a minimum of two hours to generate imagine buying

A new game like minecraft and then having to wait that long every time you wanted to play a new game most people would want their money back so quick it’s been stuck on the screen for like 10 15 minutes now and that’s how long i have to wait every

Single time a quantum computer will be able to reduce this generation that takes 11 hours down to a few seconds or minutes like something you’d expect with minecraft world generation the only problem is i tried for a solid week straight and i’m talking sun up the sun down

Trying to turn this regular algorithm into a quantum algorithm and it was just too difficult for me to do in that time span so i instead had to wait forever and generate those complex worlds on a regular computer but i still believe that this is possible to do with the quantum

Computers that ibm has running today in fact i’m still trying to figure it out in my free time because it’s quite a fun challenge but i have no idea just how long it’s going to take me to figure that out if it’s even possible at all and the show had to go on

So hey got me some slack but knowing what i know now about quantum computers i am very excited about how they might shake things up in the years to come sure there’s potential threats to our cyber security that quantum computers might be able to destroy and we probably should focus on that and

There’s also quantum drug development that might save a lot of lives but just imagine using a quantum computer to generate a new unique fortnite size map with all its detail at the click of a button all right anywho anywho i want to give a huge thanks to kiskit learning about quantum computing has

Been a lot of fun and i cannot wait to see where they take this technology quantum computing is still very very new and just like neural networks in the early days it’s working on trying to figure out exactly where and when it will be useful so shout out to all the quantum

Computing researchers out there if you want to support me in this channel please go check out kiskit’s youtube channel there you can learn all types of stuff on how to program for their quantum computers it was a great help for me when i got started and more resources are in the description