Measure me! Improve your qubit manufacturing!

April 20, 2022 12:38 PM

From the people who brought you "A Dark Room." The Qubit Game is a little game where you protect linnocent-looking qubits from villainous heat blobs. Along the way you measure and store information, dread cosmic rays, and learn about quantum coherence, entanglement, helium coolant, and laser cooling. Then things ratchet up.

Created by Doublespeak Games (previously) for Google's Quantum AI efforts.

Trailer.

Also previously.

posted by doctornemo (16 comments total)

How long until you can auto-cool things? I'm happy to idle with this, but I don't want to keep clicking...
posted by Going To Maine at 1:37 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I can't stop reading the little qubits saying "I'm entangled!" in Ralph Wiggum's voice.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:53 PM on April 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

It took me about 45 minutes, but now I have 265 little qubits working via automation to produce 4,000-12,000 units of info every seven or eight seconds.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:54 PM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Protip: if you're on a desktop, and it tells you it doesn't run on mobile, try widening the browser window.
posted by box at 2:07 PM on April 20, 2022

Well, the first place it's really dragging for me is generating the components for the Mastermind-style puzzles - it seems like you have manually reset the instruction set when you switch between algorithms?
posted by sagc at 2:45 PM on April 20, 2022

It took me way too long to realise I didn't have to click on the little heat thingies and could just move my pointer near them and they'd bounce away.
posted by fight or flight at 3:41 PM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

This was sort of entertaining for a while and pretty quick as incremental games go, but really not at the level of "a dark room". At some point in the post game (at some point you get a certificate, but emails with goals keep coming after that) I have to admit that I just googled to find out how much more there was rather than generating more algorithms.

(I also don't feel like I actually learned anything about quantum computing, or especially how it might be used -- as someone in a STEM department in academia I can tell you that it's most definitely not going to be as depicted here, where a researcher emails google and saying "our computer is stuck on a chemisty (sic) problem, please solve it for us" and then someone at google plays wordle with a quantum computer.)
posted by advil at 3:49 PM on April 20, 2022

The way it unlocks things feels more like Paperclip Simulator. And that part - the research - doesn't feel like Mastermind as much as Wordle. (The similarity made me laugh.)
posted by Pronoiac at 4:09 PM on April 20, 2022

I was going to say "yay, there's an ending," because I got a certificate in my email, but I see more algorithms just unlocked.
posted by Pronoiac at 4:38 PM on April 20, 2022

I kinda love that the certificate you get has a Save button that lets you save a little PDF of it to your computer!
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:40 PM on April 20, 2022

The game's tutorial is underestimating my reading speed by a lot.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 8:55 AM on April 21, 2022

Also the random deflection of heat particles can be frustrating when it doesn't have an effect and has to be retried 2 or more times with no visual feedback.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 8:57 AM on April 21, 2022

I think its key flaw as a member of the incremental game genre is that you can't leave it visible in the background while you try to do a non-mouse task (typing an email, eating with both hands, etc.) without it sending frequent demands for mouse action within 3 seconds, on pain of losing progress, and messages from the qubits saying "why aren't you playing the game properly?!".

Anyway, straw poll: how do mefites pronounce "qubit"? I say /ˈkwəbɪt/.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 9:09 AM on April 21, 2022

QUEUE-bit
posted by Pronoiac at 10:46 AM on April 21, 2022

without it sending frequent demands for mouse action within 3 seconds, on pain of losing progress, and messages from the qubits saying "why aren't you playing the game properly?!".

For what it's worth, at some point during the progression (not really that far along in terms of time) you will most likely permanently zoom out to a point where you don't see individual qubits or heat particles. For just gathering information, at that point it can be run fully idly. (The algorithm/wordle stuff always requires interaction though.)
posted by advil at 10:48 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

*massive* relief that this game was short. I was in for wherever it was taking me.
posted by michaelh at 11:07 AM on April 21, 2022