Description
John Conway envisioned a “Game of Life” to understand how complexity arises from simplicity. He created a simple board, with people situated around that board, and some rules that define when a person is born or dies off. Hence the game of “life”. The game led to very interesting results, for example it was found to be turing-complete. The game we have built tries to mimic this but go one step further, and bring a quantum aspect to the it. The idea is to see if making it quantum results in some interesting changes.
How to play the game?
The player can add units to the board by left-clicking on the simulation, and observe how those changes reflect in the original version vs the quantum version side-by-side.
How was this game made?
This game was made for the “Quantum Games” course at Aalto University in 2022. The creators were Aayush Kucheria and Mike Taverne. The initial idea was far more complex than what we ultimately ended up creating, and the simplification was mainly caused by low resources wrt people and time.
How is this related to quantum?
In the quantum version of the game of life which we have implemented, cells can be dead and alive at the same time. This is represented using grayscale.
Due to this, there may be multiple outcomes possible after an evolution step, leading to another state superposition, again represented in grayscale.
Tools
This game was made in Python, using the Pygame library for creating the simulation, and Qiskit for simulating the quantum phenomena. It was coded on the collaborative online IDE Repl.it.
Credits
- Aayush Kucheria – Programming and game design
- Mike Taverne – Programming and game design
- Many ideas and code sourced from Qiskit Camp – Hackathon Madrid 2019 – Quantum Game of Life.
- The semi-quantum rules were sourced from Faux, David, Mayank Shah, and Christopher Knapp. “The semi-quantum game of life.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.07835 (2019)
Download/Play
https://replit.com/@AayushKucheria/qonwaygameoflife-1?v=1
https://github.com/mtav/qonwaygameoflife
License
Apache License 2.0