We Have a Winner in the World’s First Quantum Chess Tournament
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
We have a winner in the world's first quantum chess tournament:
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 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.
[...] You don't need to be a quantum physicist to play quantum chess, per Cantwell, although it does help to already know the rules of regular chess. In quantum chess, there are multiple boards on which the pieces exist, and their number is not fixed. Players can perform "quantum moves" as well as regular chess moves; players just need to indicate which type of move they're performing. Any quantum move will create a superposition of boards (doubling the number of possible boards in the superposition with each quantum move), although the player will see a single board representing all boards at the same time. And any individual move acts on all boards at the same time.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.