Quantum Chess

Quantum phenomena have remained largely inaccessible to the general public. This can be attributed to the fact that we do not experience quantum mechanics on a tangible level in our daily lives. Games can provide an environment in which people can experience the strange behavior of the quantum world in a fun and mentally engaging way. Games can also offer an interesting test bed for near term quantum devices because they can be tailored to support varying amounts of quantum behavior through simple rule changes, which can be useful when dealing with limited resources.

Quantum Chess® is a variant of Chess, which is built on top of unitary dynamics and includes non-trivial quantum effects such as superposition, entanglement, and interference. With the introduction of the split move, players can place their pieces in superposition on multiple squares at once. For a full description of the rules, and to learn more about the game, check out the Quantum Chess website. To learn more about the math behind the game, see this paper on arxiv .

This module explores an implementation of Quantum Chess that runs using Cirq. In Concepts you will explore various quantum computing concepts, such as error mitigation, post-selection, and qubit mapping, without requiring specific domain knowledge, like quantum chemistry. In Quantum Chess REST API, you will implement a fully functional server, that defines the specific REST endpoints required by the Quantum Chess Engine to offload its quantum state handling to an external resource. A similar server was used in this presentation to run Quantum Chess on Google's Rainbow chip during the Google Quantum AI Summer symposium.