We have a winner in the world’s first quantum chess tournament

Enlarge / A player from Amazon, Aleksander Kubica, won the world's first quantum chess tournament during last week's virtual Q2B conference on quantum computing. (credit: lucadp/Getty Images)

Forget all those amusing memes of Anya Taylor-Joy's Beth Harmon from The Queen's Gambit facing off against Spock in Star Trek's infamous 3D chess. We want to see Beth take on challengers in a quantum chess tournament. The world's first such tournament was held December 9 as part of the virtual Q2B 2020 conference on quantum computing, with Amazon's Aleksander Kubica emerging victorious, New Scientist reports.

What exactly is quantum chess? It's a complicated version of regular chess that incorporates the quantum concepts of superposition, entanglement, and interference. It's like you're playing in a multiverse but the different boards [in different universes] are connected to each other," said Caltech physicist Spiros Michalakis during a livestream of the tournament. It makes 3D chess from Star Trek look silly."

Quantum chess (as played in the tournament) is the brainchild of Chris Cantwell of Quantum Realm Games. When he was a graduate student in quantum computing at the University of Southern California, he got the idea while working on a project for a class on creativity and invention. My initial goal was to create a version of quantum chess that was truly quantum in nature, so you get to play with the phenomenon," Cantwell told Gizmodo back in 2016. I didn't want it to just be a game that taught people quantum mechanics." By playing the game, the player slowly develops an intuitive sense of the rules governing the quantum realm. In fact, I feel like I've come to more intuitively understand quantum phenomena myself, just by making the game," he said.

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