Quantum 8 Ball

Inspiration

Online 8 Ball is a scam. Pseudorandom numbers are used to give you advice packaged as if it were a message to the universe. Philosophically, we could not stand for this. If an 8 ball is to exist, it must truly send you a message from the universe. To achieve true randomness, we leverage the intrinsic uncertainty of our universe's fundamental particles.

What it does

Our 8 ball will give you a response (as any 8 ball does) to your query. When the user queries our Quantum 8 Ball, our code generates a quantum circuit that prepares specified quantum states that—when measured—collapse to a definite choice between 20 responses. This quantum circuit, along with measurement mechanisms, is packaged and sent to one of IBM's 100 qubit quantum computers, where the circuit is executed and the intrinsically random results are relayed back to the user.

How we built it

We built it using qiskit a powerful quantum computing library in Python, which provides tools to design, simulate, and execute quantum circuits. Using Qiskit, we constructed a circuit that creates a superposition of quantum states, representing the 20 options, and efficiently collapses it to a single choice through measurement. We used qiskit runtime to run our code on phyiscal qubits on a quantum computer.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulty extracting the shot by shot data from the quantum computer as typically the data is packaged in such a way where only the expectation values of the desired observables are transmitted and not the raw shot data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to say that our code is robust, in that it is flexible to any kind of 8 ball we want. For instance, we created a code that can generate a quantum circuit that prepares a state with arbitrary probabilities. Thus, could decide between n options with complete randomness. Fundamentally unpredictable until it is measured.

What's next for Quantum 8 Ball

We would hope to expand this into an app where the user could execute their querries and let the universe decide. Also, we would want a quantum coin flipper and other random fun!