The Final Major Patch Before Full Release: my thoughts, server reset
Quantum Odyssey · published
Dear Seekers,
We are now about to wrap up preparations for the upcoming Large Patch. It will bring a lot of changes, mostly related to how metrics are calculated and displayed. The game will finally make it obvious that all that matters is the quality of your submitted solution and not the time spent or mistakes made (in the current build, mistakes matter; time does not). The new scoring system is geared towards motivating players to discover new quantum algorithms for the given problems. Those who discover the best algorithms will forever remain in the history of the given puzzle (unless somebody else moves the bar forward).
What to expect in the next patch:
Complete rework of metrics and challenge completion screens
Better in-game explanations, new Sage letters, cleaner interface
New puzzles in the modules that cover topics which require deeper explanations
Larger circuits will run at higher FPS on low-end PCs
You will finally be able to collect Cosmic Whispers :)
IMPORTANT: FULL PROGRESS SERVER RESET DUE NEXT MONTH
All the new changes break all existing leaderboards (+ we also solved an exploit that skewed the metrics), and we need to do a full Progress Reset for all players in order to have clean metrics going forward. I will never do a server reset again. I highly encourage everyone who has played QO so far to have a go at it again - the experience will be a lot smoother and more involved, with deeper secrets and lore to look for.
I believe that after this Large Patch, there will be little left to execute on in order to improve this game's mission: to make quantum computing intuitive and fun to learn, no matter your background.
Here is a timeline of how I plan to take things forward:
Hopefully succeed in uploading the next Major Patch, bug-free, by 10th September for all OSes.
Reset all user progress (except Community Challenges). The game will be (near?) complete at this point.
Increase the price of the game so that we honor people who bought it during its Early Access phase.
Patches going forward after 10th September will be focused on translating the game into other languages.
I will keep reading feedback, seeing how people tackle the game, and staying involved in the community for as long as it takes until all requests are resolved (most should be addressed in this patch).
Somewhere around February next year, if translations are well received, we should be able to go Full Release! Ideas to prepare for this event are more than welcome; I am very bad at marketing.
What this game is
To be clear, this game's gameplay is 1:1 with everything you can do on a Turing-complete (universal) Quantum Computer (from the top of my head, a short list of QHW makers: IBM, Google, Rigetti, IonQ, Quantinuum, IQM, OQC, QuEra, Atom Computing, Pasqal, Xanadu, PsiQuantum, Fujitsu). This means that if you build intuition for the visual rules in QO, you will have intuition for "playing" with QHW made by such manufacturers without having to learn much else.
On learning curve and achieving game (quantum computing?!) mastery
This is not a videogame where the developer invented some puzzle rules. What the dev did here is invent a visual method that can transform the underlying mathematics into fully visual puzzles. I wish I could make the game easier by inventing some new rules. I won't, because I want this game to be the real thing. Learning the fundamental rules of this game equates to learning what QHW can do.
Hopefully, in visual form, this is something anybody can now do, no matter how much they hate math.
Going forward and mastering the game... now that, I honestly don't know if it has a ceiling. We have had quantum physics for 100 years, yet we have about 10 useful quantum algorithms known today. Who knows where the ceiling is? Who knows what one can do with, after mastering the rules of this game? Nothing really should feel impossible. I hope this game will inspire people outside physics to do a lot more than what I see today. A quantum computing/physicist has very little incentive to think of a quantum algorithm for, i.e., a game theory/finance/security/biology problem, given how few of them actively work in the field compared to the actual demand. Hence, I hope new quantum algos will come from people who actively work in the domains where this "new way of thinking" (from Boolean logic to linear algebraic logic?) has applicability. I hope we can soon start some competitions to get players to solve some non-trivial problems.
What's the big deal about finding quantum algorithms?
Why do we have about 10 in 100 years of QM??
For me, finding quantum algorithms is all about understanding that unitary matrices evolve a state vector of complex numbers, and all you need to think of is whether you can take your domain problem and express it in a form that these unitary matrices can bring some speed-up in solving. That's it. Ignore the lack of good-enough hardware; we simply don't have good proof-of-concept ideas out there.
I remember... I struggled for a long time to understand Grover's quantum search algorithm during my PhD days. The wording textbooks used and the math behind it made very little sense. It was the first algorithm I put in the game.
Seeing it in visual form made me tear up. Is it really that simple, clean, beautiful? Is the "amplitude amplification" in its diffusion operator simply adding a red line on the maximally 11..11 state that then has a propagation effect everywhere else to affect all the phases? Is this really it? It then immediately felt to me like a gimmick one could have simply come up with in 5 minutes by having access to a game like this, where math is fully shown in visual form!! Showing the visual (GIF, why in this modern era do no digitized papers out there still support embedded GIFs??) alone is enough to make understanding happen.
The way I thought things in the game
Missing Sage believes you shouldn't know any theory -> just by using the Forge, you will come up with your own unique way of using quantum computers and inventing algorithms. This character came to me after seeing enough postdocs and QC professors from enough universities playing the game. It felt like the people who knew all the theory and could recognize what each gate does were very bad at actually using the logic sets in thinking circuits. Perhaps knowing all quantum theory does not make one capable of easily building a quantum circuit?
Sage of Axioms believes theory comes first, and hers is the main path that takes you to the other Sages who want you to have a solid foundation before discussing higher-order ideas (like known algorithms). She deep-dives into computation and both the linear algebra and physics behind it, in hopes of convincing you that it's not so hard to learn by combining it with the visuals of the Forge. And not scary!
Quantum Arena (community content) is filled today with some incredible challenges that touch topics I haven't seen anywhere else in the world in a visual way. From Clifford decompositions down to wordless tutorials on how to play the game and understand each gate, I am now inclined to tell players that they might want to enter the Arena to learn to play the game instead of following through the tutorials I made for it. This goes to show what a brilliant community of dedicated players this game has gathered so far.
Without you and the highly involved players we have on Discord, we wouldn't be able to come this far. Early Access gave me exactly what I was looking for to make sure the game delivers when complete.
It would help me enormously if you could leave a Steam review for the game and spread the word about it; it keeps us motivated to push forward! I hope we have the momentum it takes to make Full Release a success!
Quantum should be for everyone.
Stay quantum,
QI team